[warning: I am participating in GRID activities and research with my current job. These opinions are my own.]
It is important to note that the GRID currently is not aiming to satisfy a "business case". Specifically, it is a research tool that is designed to aid scientists address problems that can not (easily) be solved using existing solutions. There are many good explanations of the GRID around the net, one of them is at the Globus site.
There are a few examples of where the GRID is being used or will soon be used in the research community:
- NEES: National Earthquake Engineering Simulation GRID
- HENP: High Energy Nuclear Physics working group
- Internet2: How the Internet2 infrastructure is being used in the development of various GRID projects.
Now, there are additional reasons as to why businesses might be interested in projects such as the GRID. I come from a FEA background and it would be useful to many organizations to be able to harness multiple systems to complete some of the CPU, data and time intensive tasks that the GRID proposes to address.
Further, the GRID's long term goal is to provide the ability to offer compute cycles and storage in a way that the current electrical power grid does. I am sure we can all imagine personal uses for this sort of power. Creating a viable business end for this is the question that I can not answer (and that you are asking). However, creating this system will help researchers. Once it is available, creating consumer level benefits should not be difficult.
Finally, you mention some of the policy issues, particularly concerning data storage. One of the key parts of the GRID work involves ACLs, distributed directory services, and the like. It is important to note that organizations in GRID projects (and corporations of the future who might use GRID like services) will have the ability to grant/deny access to their systems. There is a great deal of effort currently under way to make sure that the grid is not going to become a general purpose storage system for everyone's generic data. Some of the work on this type of middleware is available at the Internet2 middleware site.
One of the things that open source is good at is distributed development. I don't know that anyone can argue that point. However, services are more than just code. I think that MS is positioning itself into a world where the code is not as important as the directed effort of many people.
The corporate lock-step activity necessary to execute a services plan is different than the open source model. In many ways, the services that are to be provided require a large marketing team to convince companies to use a new type of software (such as.Net). While the open source community can quickly create versions of.Net, the community would be hard pressed to create.Net from scratch AND get large corporate participation in the way that Microsoft is doing. (Yes yes yes, the reason that they can do it is because of their monopolistic position).
So what if we let MS do all of the marketing work, and then reverse engineer all the code. Would this mean that MS is right and open source is stealing all the work? Is it more like the generic drug companies? Is it possible for open source to "embrace and extend" on MS activities?
These are questions that are impossible to answer at the moment, but interesting to think about. Finishing back on the original point, however, we should really examine what these "services" are and if there is more to them than just code.
...and what about old games...
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 1
with the talk of oldgames being revised with new, big-gun, uber-3D engines [blah blah blah], makes you long for the days when a good game could fit on a disk... or two. I think a section for games would be quite interesting.
I am trying to think of an off the top of my head way to find single disk games using a favorite search engine, but am not thinking of any really good queries. This is under the assumption that I don't find aggregation sites such as tiny apps.
So, I have one of the Sony CDs in my possession. Initially, I did not think much of it until I went to listen to the CD while working... now I am fairly irritated. I know that the goal is to prevent theft, but I now want a solution for those of us who honestly want to listen to the CDs on a computer. Is anyone interested in working on one of these CDs?
Other sites went to stripped down initial pages
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One of the things that I noticed were that many of the major sites reduced the content size on their home pages to the smallest size possible. I know that the NYT, MS-NBC and other sites removed most all of their images and went to fairly small home pages with a few lines of text.
I think it is a credit to Slashcode, the Slash coders and great up-front planning that Slashdot was able to handle the load as well as it did. I know that Slashdot was one of the few sites where I could get a collection of information when many of the other sites were down.
As I recall, most astronauts who are in space for any extended period of time have a fairly rigorous workout routine to prevent muscle atrophy. Obviously, exercising with spring based machines (as it is fairly pointless to try to "lift" weights) helps to keep muscles in shape but also stresses the bones also helps maintain bone mass.
The Discovery article states "...in both older women and weightless astronauts, the bone-repair mechanisms in the body shut down." Are there any doctors out there that can explain (in detail) what happens to the body in low gravity that causes bones to atrophy?
A company I worked for several years ago was picked by a major prospective client to showcase our technology in front of hundreds of people (and competitors). The code would not be in beta for weeks, but the company decided to pretend it did not matter. As we were waiting to go on stage, the team started to "optimize" the demo and pushed the code- the code broke. There was major confusion and worry. Our senior sales guy said, "don't worry, I'll handle this. Just leave the machine alone and I'll do the rest."
The team ignored him and tried to fix the demo in the hour before we went onstage. They completely messed up the machine. The sales guy came in looking confident, asked if the machine was still broken, and then took the machine up to the stage. On his way to the podium, he "dropped" the machine to the horror of everyone in the audience except our engineers.
We later learned he was not too eager to show off the beta code either, and would probably have done the same thing regardless of what happened in the prep room.
I must say that there are plenty of people (managers, support, IT, HR, etc.) that have the exact same types of problems/foibles/etc. Why is it that they are focusing on programmers instead of how to more properly screen out these types of employees, work with them, provide education to them, etc.
while I instinctively agree with the article's statement that prima donnas should be removed from teams (there is a decent discussion towards the end of the article), I feel that there should have been some more discussion in the article that did not just write them off completely.
The article's subtitle is "managing the employee..." I guess that firing them is one way to manage, but I hoped for a more interesting solution.
First off, I think it is fairly difficult for someone to say that something is or is not art. Today's NYT's has an interesting article on that subject. However, I am not sure that saying that everything can be art, or that nothing is art really helps anyone.
I know that there are a number of people working on digital art projects in the academic realm as well as in the commercial field. (MIT's media lab is a neat place, prob not the artistic ammunition you need) (something is wrong with RISD's site, I suspect they could provide good academic support.)
The first thing to say to defend the belief that digital works can be art is to draw the analogy to the initial receptions of impressionism (a la Monet Pissaro) and abstract impressism (a la Pollack, Kandinsky). Then, you would probably want to talk about some more examples of "art" that use technology as a medium. From an artistic standpoint (and I am not in any ways an artist, or an anuthroity on what it takes to be one) it seems that one would need a vision and a desire to create something that has meaning. I know that performance art is about the execution/performance. So, digital art could include things like video games, which has been discussed on slashdot before.
Overall, I must say that to make the sweeping generalization that digital "things" can not be art is a bit shortsighted. The evolution of technology has always had an effect on the ability to create art (most modern artists do not need to "learn" alchemy in order to make paint...).
I think this is an interesting idea, but part of me feels that this is also a vague form of pollution. There are thousands of little bits of bolts/tools/metal scrap that float around the earth right now. NASA has a team of people who need to track this stuff so that spacecraft do not accidentally collide with a 10 gram lugnut that is travelling at thousands of miles an hour (imagine the chip that must put in your windshield...).
I think of the physical aspects of projects like this are, at this point in our space-enabled-life, fairly inconsequential, but we should be thinking about it. however, the more troubling aspect is the idea of sending DNA across space and time, not really knowing if it could be considered a pollutant to other places, other life-forms, or even back to us.
So the meanderings of my mind put together a few events. First, there is a belief that life might have started on this planet from basic building blocks deposited via asteroids. There is a fairly decent sized debate regarding the real/possible/potential up/down-side of geneticaly modified food. So if you take these two together, is there any chance that a project like this could backfire?
The fair counterpoint is that there could also be some sort of windfall effect from this also...
I recall that when the Stealth Bomber first came out there was some discussion regarding the plane's radar signature from different directions. It is important to note that radar generally hits a plane front the front/side/back. However, if one positions a radar in the air, you can more easily see a plan as its footprint changes to not only via larger surface area, but with changes in the way that the radar absorbtive material works. if one were using multitudes of cell phones signals from multiple locations, it might be possible to find vulnerabilities in the physical geometry of the plane's bottom side.
These are known "flaws" of the system. So I wonder if the "cool" factor of the cell phone signal is the news, as opposed to the fact that it is possible to use waves (of any sort) to track a stealh plane.
This makes a person take pause, particularly when one considers the games with which many American's grew up. Does this mean that New Yorkers could take offense at Monopoly (the game (and note the nice URL), not the practice)? What about the different cultures represented in the game Age of Empires (Huns, Aztecs, Mayans, Koreans and Spanish in the recent edition). Would this be the a way for people to kick Microsoft in the shin?
Truthfully, without knowning more about the Lego game or the laws that are being cited to pressure Lego, I can not say a great deal. However, it does seem extremely odd to assume that the Maori "peoople" are all in agreement over this.
Specifically, I wonder what their points of contention are? Usage of "names that sound Maori" is prob would not stand up well as a legal arguement. However, it seems just as silly to think that using images of people with traditional tatoo/painting patterns (as many Maori have) would become problematic. What of the American Indians? Would they be able to *legally* prevent the use of "indian" images. (Note: there are a great number of debates on this topic with US sports teams, however, afaik, none of these discussions are being handled as legal matters.)
All that said, assume that Lego continues and the issue is brought to trail. If the trial was lost, what penalties could be levied? Aside from removing the game from market, who might be the recipient of damages? A class action representing all Maoris?
Or, is all this legal rumbling simply a way to gain exposure to the issue, without any real expectation of legal action?
It has been posted here before, but the site Bad Astronomy has some great information on combatting the people who believe that the landings were faked. Most of the information is laid out in a good manner that is easy to understand, partic for third parties you point to the site.
I have a different question for you: Why do you care? Whether a laptop uses a TM chip or Intel or AMD is totally invisible. The only question is performance versus battery life versus cost.
Good points and my post assumed a few things. First, that the TM chips have a gee-whiz factor that makes them interesting toys. In that they are interesting, it might be nice to expose others to the technology.
Second, I believe (as do many others) that there are uses for a low-power chip. Consumer laptops may not be the ideal market. However, providing these chips to the wider market cuases several things. The first is economies of scale. If a slow laptop were priced competively with the added bonus of battery life or low-heat (assuming that those are valid benefits), maybe people would be interested. Second, is simple exposure- maybe someone will think up a better use than what we see today.
With all the problems associated with purchasing electronics from overseas (support, replacement parts, availability), what is the best way to convince the manufacturers to provide Transmeta chips for US devices? Having a handful of hardcore enthusiasts surf the net (to get what is essentially showoff/toy hardware as they could get similar devices in the US) would seem to simply satiate the demand curve of the most vocal and knowledgeable.
What activities would help "the masses" get their hands on the technology? (I have a few ideas, but would be interested in seeing what others think would be effective, particularly if executed en masse).
I recently moved to SF to work for an internet related company, and one of the things I noticed was the amount of time people spent in the office doing things unrelated to work. We have a pool table, a full kitchen, our HQ office has foosball, coffee/espresso... This means that people are encouraged to spend more time in the office, but they are not necessarily getting more done.
I come from the automotive undustry where there is a good deal of inertia to get out of the office as quickly as possible. Meaning, most people would rather spend 30 minutes working (to get home sooner) than playing pool and staying at the office longer. When people say that they are working longer hours, I wonder if they are getting more done in each day/week/month.
I realize that most of the readers of this site will stand behind a product they like, even when it trips up for a release. However, many people in the US can not necessarily be relied upon to stand behind a product for any extended period. As this is true, is it very surprising that companies try to reap as much as they can during the short period of time that they have a product that people like?
This said, I also realize that many companies have cornered their clients. If you have deployed a large software architecture, you really are stuck, I believe the word used was "extorted." (acknowledging that my point stems more from my experience with consumers who relgiously seek out the lowest prices with no heed for service or quaility as opposed to software.
There are companies that specialize in the ongoing support and maintenance of custom code- open or closed. I know that the majority of business for these groups comes from clients who have implemented closed software, but there are a number of projects that sit on top of open source foundations.
One of the added benefits is that the noise level of an office/cube is reduced substantially. I know I have started to find that the several machines in my office and the related noise from fans are starting to get fairly bothersome. Oddly, it is my laptop fan that is the noisiest.
I know that IBM is working on an ultra-quiet drive for laptops, so I am not the only person who is starting to find that noise is an issue. Do any of you have noise issues?
This post titled 'Why OSX on Intel/AMD CANNOT WORK'
is somewhat amusing a I dig down to figure out a bit more regarding OSX on x86 and alternates to Carbon/Cocoa (should the term Aqua be attached to those two?). Funny how things change, it is only from Oct of 2000 also.
I am not an Apple die-hard so I have not been following the development of Darwin. The part of the x86 announcement that is interesting for me is the possibility of a Mac applications getting ported to open/free alternatives to the proprietary Mac UI.
Is this a pipe dream? I know there are probably some hardware issues to resolve (nothing a few programmers and a few long nights can not solve...). The issue in my mind is if there is a desire to get the entire Mac applications running on x86 by using Darwin & an free/open UI interface. (Or is this part of Apple's long term plan?)
currently in SF, my home DSL is rated at 160kbps for $69/mo throught Megapath (via NorthPoint in the past, but soon to be through some other vendor as NP is out of business).
There is a good, short explanation of what factors limit DSL speed. I know that I can increase the DSL speed to my home to a max of 1.1Mbps, but the rate was a bit more than I wanted to spend. I have not seen anyone locally providing the theoretical max of 7Mbps mentioned in the above article. The only people with that level of throughput to their homes (that I know of) are using cable modems.
Currently, my company is also going through the process of creating a privacy policy. The draft versions were, as expected, rough and in need of a great deal of modifications- both legal and procedureal.
One of the best elements to our process was the fact that employees were asked their opinions as the policy was written. This sort of iterative feedback not only created awareness and buy-in, but it also created a more rational set of policies.
What I learned: It might be useful to import some of the old software development techniques into the creation of corporate documents.
Slashdot Mirror
[warning: I am participating in GRID activities and research with my current job. These opinions are my own.]
It is important to note that the GRID currently is not aiming to satisfy a "business case". Specifically, it is a research tool that is designed to aid scientists address problems that can not (easily) be solved using existing solutions. There are many good explanations of the GRID around the net, one of them is at the Globus site.
There are a few examples of where the GRID is being used or will soon be used in the research community:
- NEES: National Earthquake Engineering Simulation GRID
- HENP: High Energy Nuclear Physics working group
- Internet2: How the Internet2 infrastructure is being used in the development of various GRID projects.
Now, there are additional reasons as to why businesses might be interested in projects such as the GRID. I come from a FEA background and it would be useful to many organizations to be able to harness multiple systems to complete some of the CPU, data and time intensive tasks that the GRID proposes to address.
Further, the GRID's long term goal is to provide the ability to offer compute cycles and storage in a way that the current electrical power grid does. I am sure we can all imagine personal uses for this sort of power. Creating a viable business end for this is the question that I can not answer (and that you are asking). However, creating this system will help researchers. Once it is available, creating consumer level benefits should not be difficult.
Finally, you mention some of the policy issues, particularly concerning data storage. One of the key parts of the GRID work involves ACLs, distributed directory services, and the like. It is important to note that organizations in GRID projects (and corporations of the future who might use GRID like services) will have the ability to grant/deny access to their systems. There is a great deal of effort currently under way to make sure that the grid is not going to become a general purpose storage system for everyone's generic data. Some of the work on this type of middleware is available at the Internet2 middleware site.
One of the things that open source is good at is distributed development. I don't know that anyone can argue that point. However, services are more than just code. I think that MS is positioning itself into a world where the code is not as important as the directed effort of many people.
The corporate lock-step activity necessary to execute a services plan is different than the open source model. In many ways, the services that are to be provided require a large marketing team to convince companies to use a new type of software (such as .Net). While the open source community can quickly create versions of .Net, the community would be hard pressed to create .Net from scratch AND get large corporate participation in the way that Microsoft is doing. (Yes yes yes, the reason that they can do it is because of their monopolistic position).
So what if we let MS do all of the marketing work, and then reverse engineer all the code. Would this mean that MS is right and open source is stealing all the work? Is it more like the generic drug companies? Is it possible for open source to "embrace and extend" on MS activities?
These are questions that are impossible to answer at the moment, but interesting to think about. Finishing back on the original point, however, we should really examine what these "services" are and if there is more to them than just code.
I am trying to think of an off the top of my head way to find single disk games using a favorite search engine, but am not thinking of any really good queries. This is under the assumption that I don't find aggregation sites such as tiny apps.
So, I have one of the Sony CDs in my possession. Initially, I did not think much of it until I went to listen to the CD while working... now I am fairly irritated. I know that the goal is to prevent theft, but I now want a solution for those of us who honestly want to listen to the CDs on a computer. Is anyone interested in working on one of these CDs?
I think it is a credit to Slashcode, the Slash coders and great up-front planning that Slashdot was able to handle the load as well as it did. I know that Slashdot was one of the few sites where I could get a collection of information when many of the other sites were down.
Kudos to all of you.
The Discovery article states "...in both older women and weightless astronauts, the bone-repair mechanisms in the body shut down." Are there any doctors out there that can explain (in detail) what happens to the body in low gravity that causes bones to atrophy?
Mars' gravity, compared to Earth's, is 0.38 to that experienced on earth. Now, I have no idea what this means for bone structure as IANADoctor.
The team ignored him and tried to fix the demo in the hour before we went onstage. They completely messed up the machine. The sales guy came in looking confident, asked if the machine was still broken, and then took the machine up to the stage. On his way to the podium, he "dropped" the machine to the horror of everyone in the audience except our engineers.
We later learned he was not too eager to show off the beta code either, and would probably have done the same thing regardless of what happened in the prep room.
I must say that there are plenty of people (managers, support, IT, HR, etc.) that have the exact same types of problems/foibles/etc. Why is it that they are focusing on programmers instead of how to more properly screen out these types of employees, work with them, provide education to them, etc.
while I instinctively agree with the article's statement that prima donnas should be removed from teams (there is a decent discussion towards the end of the article), I feel that there should have been some more discussion in the article that did not just write them off completely.
The article's subtitle is "managing the employee..." I guess that firing them is one way to manage, but I hoped for a more interesting solution.
First off, I think it is fairly difficult for someone to say that something is or is not art. Today's NYT's has an interesting article on that subject. However, I am not sure that saying that everything can be art, or that nothing is art really helps anyone.
I know that there are a number of people working on digital art projects in the academic realm as well as in the commercial field. (MIT's media lab is a neat place, prob not the artistic ammunition you need) (something is wrong with RISD's site, I suspect they could provide good academic support.)
The first thing to say to defend the belief that digital works can be art is to draw the analogy to the initial receptions of impressionism (a la Monet Pissaro) and abstract impressism (a la Pollack, Kandinsky). Then, you would probably want to talk about some more examples of "art" that use technology as a medium. From an artistic standpoint (and I am not in any ways an artist, or an anuthroity on what it takes to be one) it seems that one would need a vision and a desire to create something that has meaning. I know that performance art is about the execution/performance. So, digital art could include things like video games, which has been discussed on slashdot before.
Overall, I must say that to make the sweeping generalization that digital "things" can not be art is a bit shortsighted. The evolution of technology has always had an effect on the ability to create art (most modern artists do not need to "learn" alchemy in order to make paint...).
I think of the physical aspects of projects like this are, at this point in our space-enabled-life, fairly inconsequential, but we should be thinking about it. however, the more troubling aspect is the idea of sending DNA across space and time, not really knowing if it could be considered a pollutant to other places, other life-forms, or even back to us.
So the meanderings of my mind put together a few events. First, there is a belief that life might have started on this planet from basic building blocks deposited via asteroids. There is a fairly decent sized debate regarding the real/possible/potential up/down-side of geneticaly modified food. So if you take these two together, is there any chance that a project like this could backfire?
The fair counterpoint is that there could also be some sort of windfall effect from this also...
I recall that when the Stealth Bomber first came out there was some discussion regarding the plane's radar signature from different directions. It is important to note that radar generally hits a plane front the front/side/back. However, if one positions a radar in the air, you can more easily see a plan as its footprint changes to not only via larger surface area, but with changes in the way that the radar absorbtive material works. if one were using multitudes of cell phones signals from multiple locations, it might be possible to find vulnerabilities in the physical geometry of the plane's bottom side.
These are known "flaws" of the system. So I wonder if the "cool" factor of the cell phone signal is the news, as opposed to the fact that it is possible to use waves (of any sort) to track a stealh plane.
This makes a person take pause, particularly when one considers the games with which many American's grew up. Does this mean that New Yorkers could take offense at Monopoly (the game (and note the nice URL), not the practice)? What about the different cultures represented in the game Age of Empires (Huns, Aztecs, Mayans, Koreans and Spanish in the recent edition). Would this be the a way for people to kick Microsoft in the shin?
Truthfully, without knowning more about the Lego game or the laws that are being cited to pressure Lego, I can not say a great deal. However, it does seem extremely odd to assume that the Maori "peoople" are all in agreement over this.
Specifically, I wonder what their points of contention are? Usage of "names that sound Maori" is prob would not stand up well as a legal arguement. However, it seems just as silly to think that using images of people with traditional tatoo/painting patterns (as many Maori have) would become problematic. What of the American Indians? Would they be able to *legally* prevent the use of "indian" images. (Note: there are a great number of debates on this topic with US sports teams, however, afaik, none of these discussions are being handled as legal matters.)
All that said, assume that Lego continues and the issue is brought to trail. If the trial was lost, what penalties could be levied? Aside from removing the game from market, who might be the recipient of damages? A class action representing all Maoris?
Or, is all this legal rumbling simply a way to gain exposure to the issue, without any real expectation of legal action?
It has been posted here before, but the site Bad Astronomy has some great information on combatting the people who believe that the landings were faked. Most of the information is laid out in a good manner that is easy to understand, partic for third parties you point to the site.
Good points and my post assumed a few things. First, that the TM chips have a gee-whiz factor that makes them interesting toys. In that they are interesting, it might be nice to expose others to the technology.
Second, I believe (as do many others) that there are uses for a low-power chip. Consumer laptops may not be the ideal market. However, providing these chips to the wider market cuases several things. The first is economies of scale. If a slow laptop were priced competively with the added bonus of battery life or low-heat (assuming that those are valid benefits), maybe people would be interested. Second, is simple exposure- maybe someone will think up a better use than what we see today.
With all the problems associated with purchasing electronics from overseas (support, replacement parts, availability), what is the best way to convince the manufacturers to provide Transmeta chips for US devices? Having a handful of hardcore enthusiasts surf the net (to get what is essentially showoff/toy hardware as they could get similar devices in the US) would seem to simply satiate the demand curve of the most vocal and knowledgeable.
What activities would help "the masses" get their hands on the technology? (I have a few ideas, but would be interested in seeing what others think would be effective, particularly if executed en masse).
I come from the automotive undustry where there is a good deal of inertia to get out of the office as quickly as possible. Meaning, most people would rather spend 30 minutes working (to get home sooner) than playing pool and staying at the office longer. When people say that they are working longer hours, I wonder if they are getting more done in each day/week/month.
Sorta makes one wonder about the fundamental engineering behind Dell's notebooks. To be fair, a similar problem plagued certain Compaq notebooks.
I realize that most of the readers of this site will stand behind a product they like, even when it trips up for a release. However, many people in the US can not necessarily be relied upon to stand behind a product for any extended period. As this is true, is it very surprising that companies try to reap as much as they can during the short period of time that they have a product that people like?
This said, I also realize that many companies have cornered their clients. If you have deployed a large software architecture, you really are stuck, I believe the word used was "extorted." (acknowledging that my point stems more from my experience with consumers who relgiously seek out the lowest prices with no heed for service or quaility as opposed to software.
There are companies that specialize in the ongoing support and maintenance of custom code- open or closed. I know that the majority of business for these groups comes from clients who have implemented closed software, but there are a number of projects that sit on top of open source foundations.
A link to the management service providers website.
disclosure: I happen to work for a company that is part of the MSP organization.
One of the added benefits is that the noise level of an office/cube is reduced substantially. I know I have started to find that the several machines in my office and the related noise from fans are starting to get fairly bothersome. Oddly, it is my laptop fan that is the noisiest.
I know that IBM is working on an ultra-quiet drive for laptops, so I am not the only person who is starting to find that noise is an issue. Do any of you have noise issues?
This post titled 'Why OSX on Intel/AMD CANNOT WORK'
is somewhat amusing a I dig down to figure out a bit more regarding OSX on x86 and alternates to Carbon/Cocoa (should the term Aqua be attached to those two?). Funny how things change, it is only from Oct of 2000 also.
I am not an Apple die-hard so I have not been following the development of Darwin. The part of the x86 announcement that is interesting for me is the possibility of a Mac applications getting ported to open/free alternatives to the proprietary Mac UI.
Is this a pipe dream? I know there are probably some hardware issues to resolve (nothing a few programmers and a few long nights can not solve...). The issue in my mind is if there is a desire to get the entire Mac applications running on x86 by using Darwin & an free/open UI interface. (Or is this part of Apple's long term plan?)
currently in SF, my home DSL is rated at 160kbps for $69/mo throught Megapath (via NorthPoint in the past, but soon to be through some other vendor as NP is
out of business).
There is a good, short explanation of what factors limit DSL speed. I know that I can increase the DSL speed to my home to a max of 1.1Mbps, but the rate was a bit more than I wanted to spend. I have not seen anyone locally providing the theoretical max of 7Mbps mentioned in the above article. The only people with that level of throughput to their homes (that I know of) are using cable modems.
One of the best elements to our process was the fact that employees were asked their opinions as the policy was written. This sort of iterative feedback not only created awareness and buy-in, but it also created a more rational set of policies.
What I learned: It might be useful to import some of the old software development techniques into the creation of corporate documents.