You don't have enough data to ask that question. Tape backup is still the cheap way to store a lot of data in a small amount of space. however if your tapes don't take up a football field then the need for small cheap storage doesn't really hit you.
Backups have several advantages byond the above: timed snap shots. You generally keep several copies of your data from different times, realize you made a mistake several days ago, you can go back to before that mistake.
Tapes are easy to move off site. Critical data must be moved offsite. Preferably several copies.
Backups for purposes of dealing with yesterday's mistakes are better delt with via good version controll. Get and use version controll on all your documents.
Now you only need to protect against hard drive crashes, and nateral disasters. I recomend a good insurance policy. Don't protect jut the equipment, protect the income lost tryign to re-create your data. A $100,000 disaster insurance policy isn't that expensive (but you should seriously consider more!), and you need it anyway, along with thief protection.
Hard drive crashes in small systems are best protected againsts by mirroring. Copy all your data to anouther harddrive, they are cheap enough that this solves most of the hardware failure problems. I recomend a small computer locked in a basement closet, so that theives don't get it.
Once a month or so decide what is really critical and copy that to CDROMs (DVDrom?), which you store at your parents. You can get your MP3s again. You can take anouther picture of the leaning tower, so don't save it. (unless your kid is in the picture, since you can't get anouther picture of your kid at that age) Buisness data doesn't all have to be kept. Just enough that you can reconstruct your buisness. Your suppliers will be happy to send you a new price list. Linux (or whoever is now maintainign the stable kernel) will be happy to give you a new kernel.
It takes a lot of data to make a $10,000 tape drive doing 50GB at $20/tape pay for itself, and you really should seriously consider a robotic library for even more $$$. You can do the math. If you are in that crowd, StorkageTek (the company I work for) will be happy to sell you such a system. We admit freely that when you have less then 30 terabytes of data tape backup often isn't the solution.
contact their ISP. Abuse is semi-illegal already, depending on what form it takes. Take legal action if you can.
The biggest thing you do though is don't ban them directly, just take everyone to a page that says "Do to other uses from your ISP abusing our system you are blocked. Contacting your ISP has not resolved the problem. If you are the abuser go away. If you are an honest user, then switch ISPs, as you are currently paying someone who doesn't care." Some re-wording of that should be done, read it twice and you will get the idea, but my writting skills are not enough to make to readable.
Maybe ethical, depending on what you do. If you work next door, and are in the parking lot, thinking you are connected to your companies AP, but accually connecting to the neighbors, big deal. (Of cousre there may be a security problem, but that is a different issue)
Likewise if you are working someplace and need access, and are not undermining the company it is ethical, assuming you are not using much bandwidth.
I would recomend that munincapalities encourage buisness to leave their networks outside the firewall (you should use VPN to get in anyway), but firewalled to only have access to the company's website, city hall's VPN server, and any other services companys don't mind having unrestriced access to. City hall could give small tax breaks because they are using the system. Local goverments tend to have a lot of mobel units that need occosional access to city hall, but generally don't send a lot of data so they can connect to whatever network is nearby, and send their data.
I don't care if my neighbors go into my garrage to borrow a shovel to do some gardening. I mind if they borrow my shovel every day, when I need it myself, or if they break it. But when I'm at work I don't care. Unfportunatly there are enough dishonest people that will take all my tools and never return them.
I believe that the US regulations are the most lax in the developed world
Hmm.. perhaps you should research that, because I belive US regulations are the most strict. I know that there are cars in Europe that can't be sold in the US due to polution regulations (VW TDI gets about 100 hp in the US, same engine tuned different gets 150 hp in Europe, but cannot be sold in the US)
A recient trip to Spain revealed a lot of polution. It was impossibal to breath. Inside smokers were the problem, outside cars. In particular there were a lot of 2-cycle scooters running around pouring out polution.
Unfortunatly Europe is conposed of many different countries, so you can point out one country with tougher regulations and compare that to the US. California has the toughest regulations in the US, but that isn't a country so it doesn't count. (the word state in english means country)
True. But you can't forget the fact that global tempatures are currently lower then average. Leaving "the little ice age" (1200-1800) would account for global warming.
Of course the question is then is there are problem. I can't answer that. Everything feeds everything else. When we burn a drop of oil is affects how the trees grow and things like that. Forest fires are a significant cause of polution, and the well ment, but disasterious smokey the bear (Only you can prevent forest fires) program has ment that in the previous centry there were less of them. Volcanios when they errupt make up the large majority of the polution released that year.
So is there a problem or not? I can cite lots of facts. There is no way to know without controlled expiriments lasting for several million years. Even if we had the patience to see such a study through, we don't have the ability to construct several idenitical solar systems, complete with suns and planets, so we can't control the variables. Even if we could construct such systems we can't alter orbits of the planets at will, we can't prevent/cause solar flares, and we can't cause volcanos. (Even if we could, could we do it without introducing anouther variable?) Facts are easy, figgureing out what they mean is hard.
No, QA doens't take as long as coding. QA takes 50-60% of the time.
Coding is maybe 20%, design and documention are the other 30%.
Coding is the only really fun part. So programers try to make it take 50%. Further I'm considered a programer so I'm expected to spend a lot of time doing that, which can't happen because programing is such a small part of the job.
Worse, a project moves into maintance mode after it is released. I spend the majority of my time testing bits and pieces. 10% design, documentation, and coding; 75% testing, and the remaining helping customers and trying to understand their problems.
I include in test personal testing, and the supporting the system test group, but those are seperate tasks that should be brokern out.
And vise-versa. I remember in the early days of the two projects they got togather to share some code that the other lacked. This is the beauty of open source, you can share the code you need with independant entities to the beinifit of both.
My grandpa did the 8mm to VHS in the library. They have the equipment, all they ask is you use big reals, and work quickly. Of course as time went on less and less people used this, and so they relaxed the need for speed a little.
Note that he wasn't able to use his local library, but the down town (minneapolis I belive) library let him use the equipment for no charge. You might have to look around too, but you can probably find what you need at a library.
PS, keep the old film as long as you can. It has a charm of its own, and better resolution.
If you do a lot of hiway driving, than a VW TDI will get better milage, and be cheaper.
If you want to screw OPEC, (a nobel cause) than many cars come with E-85 engines. 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. A little more expensive, but not too bad, and often less than an electric equivelent. Everyone getting a new car that runs on gas should insist on this option, it doens't cost much more, and you can run on regular gas if you need to.
Bicycle. For in-town transportation of short distances an electric car comes into it's element. A bike will work just as well in most of those cases. Cheap enough that you can have it with anouther vechical. Not comfortable in bad weather, and hard to haul gear. Everyone should own and use one when they are an option. When distances are short, then the difference in time of driving vs rideing is insignificant.
Electirc car. Great for city driving. For hiway driving they end up just being heavier and thus get worse milage. Because of the weight of batteries you often can't haul a lot of gear. Excellent choice for those who only have to go a few miles.
Conversions. Do it yourself mostly, but I'm sure there are shops to do this. Ford sells rangers without engines, and I think Chevy sells the S10 the same. Take off the bed and put in a few grand worth of batteries, drop an electric moter in where the engine would be (the transmission comes with), connect the gas pedel to a controler and you are set. You can get a fairly good range, and recharge overnight (be sure to get the reduced nighttime rates from your power company). Good for commuting to work (short distances) with tools - carpenters and the like. Not enough range to drive all day, but enough for normal driving. I've considered this myself.
Airplane. Appears more expensive, but you go over the traffic jams, instead of ideling in them. You can travel 100 mph legally (depending on the plane, some top out at 45, others will go 600, 100 is a good round number that the average person could afford to achive). Useless if it is 3 miles to work, but if you need to cross the city you might save fuel.
Simulation isn't perfect, but it is a lot cheaper than full blown tests. If you solve all the problems in simulation that you can, then you have saved a ton of time any money over doing real world testing. Expirence in the real world will help you make the simulation better.
Where I worked we once modified an old router to package FDDI packets over ethernet (note, we artificially slowed the sender), transmitted them to a sun IPX (a heavy duty machine for its time, though unbearablly obsolete today), ran some hardware simluation to send it through a fddi interface, through a custom routing board, through a backplane, to a ethernet board, and then took the packet to a different router, unpackaged it, and put it on a real network. We were accually able to do telnets through our hardware simulator, so long as we keep the packet count down to about 1 a minute and could deal with long latiancys. The result is we found a lot of bugs in simulation before hardware was built. Eventially this was the first switch on the market, beating Cisco to that mark by about a year. (Of course Cisco was still the go to network provider, and their switch could do more packets, but we beat them to market)
A friend of mine works for a company that makes injection molds. the old expirenced engieers could sometimes get an acceptable mold after 3 prototypes, though 6 was considered normal for an expirenced engineer. They hired a new college grad a few years back who with simulation always gets a perfect mold on the first try. Not acceptable, perfect. With simulations he could watch hot spots, and make the changes to cool them and/or account for different contraction rates in the mold. Since a mold costs a lot of money to make, (but lasts a long time) this results in considerable costs savings for the company. The new engineer can also turn out more molds in a year because he doesn't have to analyise the failures and guess what went wrong, he knows.
that said, I agree fully that simulation can't do everything. The new engineer above still sometimes turns out a mold that fails to work, but failure analysis improved the simulation next time. When we simulated our new router previously we still found a couple hardware bugs that didn't happen in simulation. for computer simulation we can't do stress testing without real hardware, but we already have solved most of the problems by that time.
Your missing something. 4gb of Ram is all many OSes will support. a 386 can address several terrabytes, but you need to use funky segmentation registers, and anyone who remembers Dos wants nothing to do with that. I don't know about the latest linux versions, but FreeBSD doesn't do it, and I'm sure early linux versions don't. i'd be surprized if current linux versions handle that much. (Note, 32 bit machines only, I'm sure 64 bit machines like alpha supprort much more)
Of course if you need more than 4 gb of Ram you also need programs that can handle that, and I know of no such thing.
the next is can the farmer controll the equipment while playing with the compute? this of course depends on the task, Quake is going to be a lot more difficult than if the comtpuer is connected to data collection to get your current yields.
Most farmers work land close to their house and up to several miles away. What is his case? If all the land is around his house than 802.11(x) with good antennas will reach the tractor. If the latter, than get the neightbors involved if you want networking. In these days I don't think it pays to have a computer without networking.
What you accidemics fail to recall is that english is driven by usage, NOT by accidemic wishes. The french (and spanish to some extent) are different, but in english speaking worlds you can use the language any way you want to.
Now if you can't get your point across because the words are not recignised that is your problem. You will look more intelligent if you use the more standard language. Accidemics can help with getting your point across better, so long as you remember they love big words (linguistic, scene, regional variant, linguists, lexicographers, colloquial, and non-standard) that don't help the clear communication cause. They do make you appear more intelligent though.
current system I'm working on now, mounts tapes in robots. (At least that is what I can tell you). Customer has it installed, but their backups keep timing out. Turns out their network is so congested that TCP/IP is backing off assuming a very slow network. When a lot of jobs are requested at once over the same socket the last few mounts don't make it through before the program times out. (We are still trying to figgure out how anything on that subnet works) When we tell the customer to fix their network they respond "You should have realized this problem before you sold the system to us, now fix your system. Of cousre we don't supply the backup software, just the robot. (note that to avoid giving away things I'm NDA for I've changed some things in this story, you get the point but don't examine the details too close)
Same system, but this time with the tape drives. Customer sees data corruption. Not good at all. We don't know where it is, could be their end or ours, but of course we are blamed. At least we are not on the network (will a SAN, but it isn't congested).
Clustered system of two solaris machines. We are writing our own cluster software. Management give us one ethernet interface between them, (cluster must have redundant connections between them), and then wonders why we can't solve the bug where the backup system wants to take over all the time while the master is still operating.
Better than a kit, you can make a crystal radio with only bits of wire, a pin, and some magnets. There is real wow factor from winding a coil (not easy) around a magnet, anouther around an old toilet paper roll, connecting them along with some rusty razor blade, pin, ground and hundred foot antenna, and getting radio. Sure you only get the strong station in your area, but no batteries, not plug in, no electronics, yet it works.
Look for "The boy electrition" in your library. Published about 1958 or some such. cool book, and even though dated (where are you going to find a "b" battery now a days, and your lcoal drug store doesn't sell vacuume tubes anymore. Still most projects will work with what you cn find today and the book is an excellent read.
Maybe is the only way to describe them. I've seen passive repeaters, things you stick in a car window and are supposed to proved a boost. But only for the 800mhz cell frequencys, not the 1900 PCS band. Still they might be worth a shot if you have a regular cell phone.
My Nokia 5190 had a little rubber button you could remove and put an external antenna on. Run the external antenna up a tree, and reception was good. Often one bar better, but the real improvement was in clarity. Everytime you move without the antenna you introduce static, while with it you come breath and still hold a converstation. (always a good thing) The newer Nokias don't have this though, and I just broke my old phone. Still if you can stay within range of the cord this might get your service.
Best is to contact your provider. It takes 6 months or more, but they do take into account customer comments when they build new towers, so you might get one in your neighborhood. Make sure your local town concil isn't doing everything they can to block building a tower though, or you won't get it.
The perfect application for StorageTek (Disclaimer, I work for and own stock in StorageTek). Leader in tape silos for a reasons. Some of the smaller silos will deal with DLT tapes, but there are other drives we can sell you that are better in some way or anouther.
However you are talking a lot of data. We have bigger customers, but not many, and most don't store data forever. Are you sure you want this stored forever? I think you need to only store most tapes for 3 months, after which you will know which ones can be overwritten. (I'm assuming security, if no crime is reported in 3 months erase the tape) You really need to re-think this store forever idea. Nasa is about the only one who can't say when data is no longer useful.
Ahh yes, eastern front. I well remember getting 10 minutes into loading that off a cassette only to have it fail. Disks were so much better when my dad finailly scraped up the money to buy one...
You didn't have a fixed number of units per say. You had a fixed number of units, set up to match the German forces in 1941 (the russian forces of curse were fixed the same way). From time to time you got more.
Supply lines were important. you had to keep your open (anything to the east), and block the Russian's lines. The latter was the key to winning (which I never did). Kepp your lines open while also getting behind your opponants lines, but then you have also closed yours off.
Winning was 200 points at the end. It isn't hard to get 200 points after a few moves, but you could lose those points, and latter in the game that was easy to do.
I'm fairly certian that there is a SO version for windows. So install that now on all the machines and suggest that people use it. When you buy a new machine for someone who doesn't do heavy duty office work don't buy office for it, just put SO on. See what the users reaction is, if most complain then you know this isn't working, but you haven't lost much.
Don't forget training. Don't even think you can make this switch without giving users trainging. But then you can't make the switch to XP without training either, just a little less.
The unix way takes some getting used to, but I find it grows on you. Don't sell this as a windows replacement though, sell it as the new way.
Keep the latest version of wine around, it is good enough for some purposes and will help ease the transisition.
Have you ever got a document in MSWord format and not had a program that reads word? I have several times. There was a day when the docuemtn you needed was on a internet machine that you had ftp access to, but because you didn't have the right translator avaiable you couldn't read it.
While the web isn't the best possibal fix for that problem it is a good enough fix.
I disagree. Code reviews do an excellent job of catching errors. However you need a code review as soon as it compiles. Code reviews will catch those bugs that you spend the first couple weeks getting rid of. [if (x=y) instead of if (x==y), and some logic errors if(Error) { normal case} else { error case}]
I just commited a piece of code that cannot be checked any other way. Code that checks for hardware errors, but the hardware modifications to reproduce it are not worth the cost, after I was done codeing. Code reviews are my only chance of getting the code to work right.
Only? What about The Constitution party? I suspect there are others. They have minor disagreements with the libratarian party on what the constitution means (things like abortion), and that the libratarian party is willing to accept handouts from the govermetn for campagn finance if they can get it.
I have read that summery. The task was delete one sentence from a document or something similear. The vi and emacs (no mouse attached to emacs) users thought they were faster, but they were not. However this wasn't a case where you could use "dd" to delete a line, you had to go to the middle of the line, and the sentence continued onto the next line. Real world, and the GUI really is faster.
tail filename is going to be faster, and TOG has admited that his study does not cover all possibal cases. Sometime the cli is faster, sometimes the GUI is faster.
It is fairly easy to design a script to change your rating based on who is looking. joe user (who might be a kid) gets a general content rating, but everyone from a search engine,.gov, or other investigating domain gets a pron rating.
I think most/. readers can figgure out how to do this. Of course like most filtering systems it won't work perfectly, you will always give someone the wrong rating, but it will be done, you can count on it.
Your not management, and you don't directly make management decisions. But every manager should get your advice at review time for any employee you have an opinion on. (and if you don't have one on someone that says something too, but what is never sure)
Make sure you are in charge. Marketing tells you what will sell, but you have to figgure out what can be done. Often you will know more than them, but still take their advice seriously if you can.
Be in charge. don't let micromanagers dictate stupid design decisions. Don't let programers make stupid mistakes. When someone is doing something wrong you need to step in and say "NO! that can't work". Don't be afraid to do it.
Know what everyone is doing. that goes with the above. Review everyone's code, at least part of it if the project is too big. You don't have time to test and debug it, but you should know something about it. (formal code reviews are important, but you don't need to be involed with them nessicarly, just know the code)
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You don't have enough data to ask that question. Tape backup is still the cheap way to store a lot of data in a small amount of space. however if your tapes don't take up a football field then the need for small cheap storage doesn't really hit you.
Backups have several advantages byond the above: timed snap shots. You generally keep several copies of your data from different times, realize you made a mistake several days ago, you can go back to before that mistake.
Tapes are easy to move off site. Critical data must be moved offsite. Preferably several copies.
Backups for purposes of dealing with yesterday's mistakes are better delt with via good version controll. Get and use version controll on all your documents.
Now you only need to protect against hard drive crashes, and nateral disasters. I recomend a good insurance policy. Don't protect jut the equipment, protect the income lost tryign to re-create your data. A $100,000 disaster insurance policy isn't that expensive (but you should seriously consider more!), and you need it anyway, along with thief protection.
Hard drive crashes in small systems are best protected againsts by mirroring. Copy all your data to anouther harddrive, they are cheap enough that this solves most of the hardware failure problems. I recomend a small computer locked in a basement closet, so that theives don't get it.
Once a month or so decide what is really critical and copy that to CDROMs (DVDrom?), which you store at your parents. You can get your MP3s again. You can take anouther picture of the leaning tower, so don't save it. (unless your kid is in the picture, since you can't get anouther picture of your kid at that age) Buisness data doesn't all have to be kept. Just enough that you can reconstruct your buisness. Your suppliers will be happy to send you a new price list. Linux (or whoever is now maintainign the stable kernel) will be happy to give you a new kernel.
It takes a lot of data to make a $10,000 tape drive doing 50GB at $20/tape pay for itself, and you really should seriously consider a robotic library for even more $$$. You can do the math. If you are in that crowd, StorkageTek (the company I work for) will be happy to sell you such a system. We admit freely that when you have less then 30 terabytes of data tape backup often isn't the solution.
contact their ISP. Abuse is semi-illegal already, depending on what form it takes. Take legal action if you can.
The biggest thing you do though is don't ban them directly, just take everyone to a page that says "Do to other uses from your ISP abusing our system you are blocked. Contacting your ISP has not resolved the problem. If you are the abuser go away. If you are an honest user, then switch ISPs, as you are currently paying someone who doesn't care." Some re-wording of that should be done, read it twice and you will get the idea, but my writting skills are not enough to make to readable.
Maybe ethical, depending on what you do. If you work next door, and are in the parking lot, thinking you are connected to your companies AP, but accually connecting to the neighbors, big deal. (Of cousre there may be a security problem, but that is a different issue)
Likewise if you are working someplace and need access, and are not undermining the company it is ethical, assuming you are not using much bandwidth.
I would recomend that munincapalities encourage buisness to leave their networks outside the firewall (you should use VPN to get in anyway), but firewalled to only have access to the company's website, city hall's VPN server, and any other services companys don't mind having unrestriced access to. City hall could give small tax breaks because they are using the system. Local goverments tend to have a lot of mobel units that need occosional access to city hall, but generally don't send a lot of data so they can connect to whatever network is nearby, and send their data.
I don't care if my neighbors go into my garrage to borrow a shovel to do some gardening. I mind if they borrow my shovel every day, when I need it myself, or if they break it. But when I'm at work I don't care. Unfportunatly there are enough dishonest people that will take all my tools and never return them.
I believe that the US regulations are the most lax in the developed world
Hmm.. perhaps you should research that, because I belive US regulations are the most strict. I know that there are cars in Europe that can't be sold in the US due to polution regulations (VW TDI gets about 100 hp in the US, same engine tuned different gets 150 hp in Europe, but cannot be sold in the US)
A recient trip to Spain revealed a lot of polution. It was impossibal to breath. Inside smokers were the problem, outside cars. In particular there were a lot of 2-cycle scooters running around pouring out polution.
Unfortunatly Europe is conposed of many different countries, so you can point out one country with tougher regulations and compare that to the US. California has the toughest regulations in the US, but that isn't a country so it doesn't count. (the word state in english means country)
Global warming is a fact,
True. But you can't forget the fact that global tempatures are currently lower then average. Leaving "the little ice age" (1200-1800) would account for global warming.
Of course the question is then is there are problem. I can't answer that. Everything feeds everything else. When we burn a drop of oil is affects how the trees grow and things like that. Forest fires are a significant cause of polution, and the well ment, but disasterious smokey the bear (Only you can prevent forest fires) program has ment that in the previous centry there were less of them. Volcanios when they errupt make up the large majority of the polution released that year.
So is there a problem or not? I can cite lots of facts. There is no way to know without controlled expiriments lasting for several million years. Even if we had the patience to see such a study through, we don't have the ability to construct several idenitical solar systems, complete with suns and planets, so we can't control the variables. Even if we could construct such systems we can't alter orbits of the planets at will, we can't prevent/cause solar flares, and we can't cause volcanos. (Even if we could, could we do it without introducing anouther variable?) Facts are easy, figgureing out what they mean is hard.
No, QA doens't take as long as coding. QA takes 50-60% of the time.
Coding is maybe 20%, design and documention are the other 30%.
Coding is the only really fun part. So programers try to make it take 50%. Further I'm considered a programer so I'm expected to spend a lot of time doing that, which can't happen because programing is such a small part of the job.
Worse, a project moves into maintance mode after it is released. I spend the majority of my time testing bits and pieces. 10% design, documentation, and coding; 75% testing, and the remaining helping customers and trying to understand their problems.
I include in test personal testing, and the supporting the system test group, but those are seperate tasks that should be brokern out.
And vise-versa. I remember in the early days of the two projects they got togather to share some code that the other lacked. This is the beauty of open source, you can share the code you need with independant entities to the beinifit of both.
My grandpa did the 8mm to VHS in the library. They have the equipment, all they ask is you use big reals, and work quickly. Of course as time went on less and less people used this, and so they relaxed the need for speed a little.
Note that he wasn't able to use his local library, but the down town (minneapolis I belive) library let him use the equipment for no charge. You might have to look around too, but you can probably find what you need at a library.
PS, keep the old film as long as you can. It has a charm of its own, and better resolution.
Is an electric car for you? Maybe, maybe not.
If you do a lot of hiway driving, than a VW TDI will get better milage, and be cheaper.
If you want to screw OPEC, (a nobel cause) than many cars come with E-85 engines. 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. A little more expensive, but not too bad, and often less than an electric equivelent. Everyone getting a new car that runs on gas should insist on this option, it doens't cost much more, and you can run on regular gas if you need to.
Bicycle. For in-town transportation of short distances an electric car comes into it's element. A bike will work just as well in most of those cases. Cheap enough that you can have it with anouther vechical. Not comfortable in bad weather, and hard to haul gear. Everyone should own and use one when they are an option. When distances are short, then the difference in time of driving vs rideing is insignificant.
Electirc car. Great for city driving. For hiway driving they end up just being heavier and thus get worse milage. Because of the weight of batteries you often can't haul a lot of gear. Excellent choice for those who only have to go a few miles.
Conversions. Do it yourself mostly, but I'm sure there are shops to do this. Ford sells rangers without engines, and I think Chevy sells the S10 the same. Take off the bed and put in a few grand worth of batteries, drop an electric moter in where the engine would be (the transmission comes with), connect the gas pedel to a controler and you are set. You can get a fairly good range, and recharge overnight (be sure to get the reduced nighttime rates from your power company). Good for commuting to work (short distances) with tools - carpenters and the like. Not enough range to drive all day, but enough for normal driving. I've considered this myself.
Airplane. Appears more expensive, but you go over the traffic jams, instead of ideling in them. You can travel 100 mph legally (depending on the plane, some top out at 45, others will go 600, 100 is a good round number that the average person could afford to achive). Useless if it is 3 miles to work, but if you need to cross the city you might save fuel.
I partially agree, partially agree.
Simulation isn't perfect, but it is a lot cheaper than full blown tests. If you solve all the problems in simulation that you can, then you have saved a ton of time any money over doing real world testing. Expirence in the real world will help you make the simulation better.
Where I worked we once modified an old router to package FDDI packets over ethernet (note, we artificially slowed the sender), transmitted them to a sun IPX (a heavy duty machine for its time, though unbearablly obsolete today), ran some hardware simluation to send it through a fddi interface, through a custom routing board, through a backplane, to a ethernet board, and then took the packet to a different router, unpackaged it, and put it on a real network. We were accually able to do telnets through our hardware simulator, so long as we keep the packet count down to about 1 a minute and could deal with long latiancys. The result is we found a lot of bugs in simulation before hardware was built. Eventially this was the first switch on the market, beating Cisco to that mark by about a year. (Of course Cisco was still the go to network provider, and their switch could do more packets, but we beat them to market)
A friend of mine works for a company that makes injection molds. the old expirenced engieers could sometimes get an acceptable mold after 3 prototypes, though 6 was considered normal for an expirenced engineer. They hired a new college grad a few years back who with simulation always gets a perfect mold on the first try. Not acceptable, perfect. With simulations he could watch hot spots, and make the changes to cool them and/or account for different contraction rates in the mold. Since a mold costs a lot of money to make, (but lasts a long time) this results in considerable costs savings for the company. The new engineer can also turn out more molds in a year because he doesn't have to analyise the failures and guess what went wrong, he knows.
that said, I agree fully that simulation can't do everything. The new engineer above still sometimes turns out a mold that fails to work, but failure analysis improved the simulation next time. When we simulated our new router previously we still found a couple hardware bugs that didn't happen in simulation. for computer simulation we can't do stress testing without real hardware, but we already have solved most of the problems by that time.
Your missing something. 4gb of Ram is all many OSes will support. a 386 can address several terrabytes, but you need to use funky segmentation registers, and anyone who remembers Dos wants nothing to do with that. I don't know about the latest linux versions, but FreeBSD doesn't do it, and I'm sure early linux versions don't. i'd be surprized if current linux versions handle that much. (Note, 32 bit machines only, I'm sure 64 bit machines like alpha supprort much more)
Of course if you need more than 4 gb of Ram you also need programs that can handle that, and I know of no such thing.
the first question is always what is the goal?
the next is can the farmer controll the equipment while playing with the compute? this of course depends on the task, Quake is going to be a lot more difficult than if the comtpuer is connected to data collection to get your current yields.
Most farmers work land close to their house and up to several miles away. What is his case? If all the land is around his house than 802.11(x) with good antennas will reach the tractor. If the latter, than get the neightbors involved if you want networking. In these days I don't think it pays to have a computer without networking.
What you accidemics fail to recall is that english is driven by usage, NOT by accidemic wishes. The french (and spanish to some extent) are different, but in english speaking worlds you can use the language any way you want to.
Now if you can't get your point across because the words are not recignised that is your problem. You will look more intelligent if you use the more standard language. Accidemics can help with getting your point across better, so long as you remember they love big words (linguistic, scene, regional variant, linguists, lexicographers, colloquial, and non-standard) that don't help the clear communication cause. They do make you appear more intelligent though.
current system I'm working on now, mounts tapes in robots. (At least that is what I can tell you). Customer has it installed, but their backups keep timing out. Turns out their network is so congested that TCP/IP is backing off assuming a very slow network. When a lot of jobs are requested at once over the same socket the last few mounts don't make it through before the program times out. (We are still trying to figgure out how anything on that subnet works) When we tell the customer to fix their network they respond "You should have realized this problem before you sold the system to us, now fix your system. Of cousre we don't supply the backup software, just the robot. (note that to avoid giving away things I'm NDA for I've changed some things in this story, you get the point but don't examine the details too close)
Same system, but this time with the tape drives. Customer sees data corruption. Not good at all. We don't know where it is, could be their end or ours, but of course we are blamed. At least we are not on the network (will a SAN, but it isn't congested).
Clustered system of two solaris machines. We are writing our own cluster software. Management give us one ethernet interface between them, (cluster must have redundant connections between them), and then wonders why we can't solve the bug where the backup system wants to take over all the time while the master is still operating.
Better than a kit, you can make a crystal radio with only bits of wire, a pin, and some magnets. There is real wow factor from winding a coil (not easy) around a magnet, anouther around an old toilet paper roll, connecting them along with some rusty razor blade, pin, ground and hundred foot antenna, and getting radio. Sure you only get the strong station in your area, but no batteries, not plug in, no electronics, yet it works.
Look for "The boy electrition" in your library. Published about 1958 or some such. cool book, and even though dated (where are you going to find a "b" battery now a days, and your lcoal drug store doesn't sell vacuume tubes anymore. Still most projects will work with what you cn find today and the book is an excellent read.
Maybe is the only way to describe them. I've seen passive repeaters, things you stick in a car window and are supposed to proved a boost. But only for the 800mhz cell frequencys, not the 1900 PCS band. Still they might be worth a shot if you have a regular cell phone.
My Nokia 5190 had a little rubber button you could remove and put an external antenna on. Run the external antenna up a tree, and reception was good. Often one bar better, but the real improvement was in clarity. Everytime you move without the antenna you introduce static, while with it you come breath and still hold a converstation. (always a good thing) The newer Nokias don't have this though, and I just broke my old phone. Still if you can stay within range of the cord this might get your service.
Best is to contact your provider. It takes 6 months or more, but they do take into account customer comments when they build new towers, so you might get one in your neighborhood. Make sure your local town concil isn't doing everything they can to block building a tower though, or you won't get it.
The perfect application for StorageTek (Disclaimer, I work for and own stock in StorageTek). Leader in tape silos for a reasons. Some of the smaller silos will deal with DLT tapes, but there are other drives we can sell you that are better in some way or anouther.
However you are talking a lot of data. We have bigger customers, but not many, and most don't store data forever. Are you sure you want this stored forever? I think you need to only store most tapes for 3 months, after which you will know which ones can be overwritten. (I'm assuming security, if no crime is reported in 3 months erase the tape) You really need to re-think this store forever idea. Nasa is about the only one who can't say when data is no longer useful.
Ahh yes, eastern front. I well remember getting 10 minutes into loading that off a cassette only to have it fail. Disks were so much better when my dad finailly scraped up the money to buy one...
You didn't have a fixed number of units per say. You had a fixed number of units, set up to match the German forces in 1941 (the russian forces of curse were fixed the same way). From time to time you got more.
Supply lines were important. you had to keep your open (anything to the east), and block the Russian's lines. The latter was the key to winning (which I never did). Kepp your lines open while also getting behind your opponants lines, but then you have also closed yours off.
Winning was 200 points at the end. It isn't hard to get 200 points after a few moves, but you could lose those points, and latter in the game that was easy to do.
I'm fairly certian that there is a SO version for windows. So install that now on all the machines and suggest that people use it. When you buy a new machine for someone who doesn't do heavy duty office work don't buy office for it, just put SO on. See what the users reaction is, if most complain then you know this isn't working, but you haven't lost much.
Don't forget training. Don't even think you can make this switch without giving users trainging. But then you can't make the switch to XP without training either, just a little less.
The unix way takes some getting used to, but I find it grows on you. Don't sell this as a windows replacement though, sell it as the new way.
Keep the latest version of wine around, it is good enough for some purposes and will help ease the transisition.
Have you ever got a document in MSWord format and not had a program that reads word? I have several times. There was a day when the docuemtn you needed was on a internet machine that you had ftp access to, but because you didn't have the right translator avaiable you couldn't read it.
While the web isn't the best possibal fix for that problem it is a good enough fix.
I disagree. Code reviews do an excellent job of catching errors. However you need a code review as soon as it compiles. Code reviews will catch those bugs that you spend the first couple weeks getting rid of. [if (x=y) instead of if (x==y), and some logic errors if(Error) { normal case} else { error case}]
I just commited a piece of code that cannot be checked any other way. Code that checks for hardware errors, but the hardware modifications to reproduce it are not worth the cost, after I was done codeing. Code reviews are my only chance of getting the code to work right.
Only? What about The Constitution party? I suspect there are others. They have minor disagreements with the libratarian party on what the constitution means (things like abortion), and that the libratarian party is willing to accept handouts from the govermetn for campagn finance if they can get it.
I have read that summery. The task was delete one sentence from a document or something similear. The vi and emacs (no mouse attached to emacs) users thought they were faster, but they were not. However this wasn't a case where you could use "dd" to delete a line, you had to go to the middle of the line, and the sentence continued onto the next line. Real world, and the GUI really is faster.
tail filename is going to be faster, and TOG has admited that his study does not cover all possibal cases. Sometime the cli is faster, sometimes the GUI is faster.
It is fairly easy to design a script to change your rating based on who is looking. joe user (who might be a kid) gets a general content rating, but everyone from a search engine, .gov, or other investigating domain gets a pron rating.
I think most /. readers can figgure out how to do this. Of course like most filtering systems it won't work perfectly, you will always give someone the wrong rating, but it will be done, you can count on it.
Your not management, and you don't directly make management decisions. But every manager should get your advice at review time for any employee you have an opinion on. (and if you don't have one on someone that says something too, but what is never sure)
Make sure you are in charge. Marketing tells you what will sell, but you have to figgure out what can be done. Often you will know more than them, but still take their advice seriously if you can.
Be in charge. don't let micromanagers dictate stupid design decisions. Don't let programers make stupid mistakes. When someone is doing something wrong you need to step in and say "NO! that can't work". Don't be afraid to do it.
Know what everyone is doing. that goes with the above. Review everyone's code, at least part of it if the project is too big. You don't have time to test and debug it, but you should know something about it. (formal code reviews are important, but you don't need to be involed with them nessicarly, just know the code)