I doupt that. Even at a TB per cubic centimeter you aren't gonna walk out with all their data. Last month I was helping one company that was creating 3 TB of new data a day. Add up a few months of that, and you byond pocket size. This wasn't even a really big company, I've worked with some that do 20 TBs a day.
I won't even mention NASA and the like that can do a few 100 TB a day. (most of which they don't process). And speculations of what the NSA (echolin, however it is spelled) can get in a day aren't worth it. Though the latter is important to consider.
True, but at least with email it is easy to skip the long winded but useless parts.
"Hi hank, this is andrea at extention 123, thanks for getting back to me on the bacon problem, I have one more question: how many cysts are accaptable in a slice?" Said aloud I waste a couple borning minutes before getting to something useful. A reply by voice mail is just as bad because I have to give a summery of the question first. In email I just replay with an answer "5", while in voice mail my reply is "Hello andrea, about your questions about the acceptable limit of cysts in bacon, 5 reasonable limit."
Of course the above example is completely made up. (A engineer who knew a female to talk to should have been your first clue.) You get the idea, voicemail is nice, but it wastes a lot of time with redundancy and boiler plate. Email has the same thing, but you an quickly skip it.
Well, when my mom was in school they got 3 bomb threats in a month. Each was taken seriously, but for the last one they just made all the students stay in the parking lot, and held class (such as they could) outside. they never got anouther bomb threat because it was no longer a way to go home early.
That depends on the phone. All national no roaming phones (in the US) have an analog mode, and very few parts of the Us are not covered by analog. Sure the quality sucks (because the tower is miles away), but there is service. Well, at least along freeways there is service. You see cell phone companies know that travelers are a major source of income, and travelers only get off the main roads to get gas or a meal, so they cheap, towers to cover the freeway and however far out the tower happens to reach. Drive a back road and there is no service, but if you drive a back road you should be equipped to get out anyway.
Well, I don't know about the true poor (that is no money at all), but my expirence is low income folks are more likely to have a cell phone. When you are at the same location a wired phone is cheap and works. When your up in a tree picking fruit one week, and the next berries in anouther town, a cell phone is the only option. When your a carpenter making $12/hour you can't be reach any other way, and probably need a phone often to call for more supplies. (Generally you are not paid for using your personal phone for work either)
Those working at McDonalds might not be able to afford a cell phone, but few people work there who have other options, which generally means out of high school)
Sure you can cut the budget. In fact there isn't a need for any supply rockets. Just grab someone from death row who has exhausted all appeals, send them up with plenty of seed. If he can make anything grow on the moon, good for him, let him leave there forever. If not, he is a criminal who would die anyway, now he gets into history books.
Ahh, but this is about two things: PDAs and laptops.
PDA users will use it for meetings, instead of asking you if you are free for a lunch meeting friday I have my PDA find a time where we are both free to schedual a meeting, and when it says the first lunch where we are both free is a week from tuesday, we know we are both free, and if we accept it, then it is known that we will both be there.
Laptop users will use it for everything, more or less. Just today managers were asking why I wanted an ethernet interface for my laptop. (802.11 is the rule here, but not for customer sites) Give me a good cell phone connection and I will almost never need a wired connection. Of course all this assumes the cost is cheep enough, but I think sprint can come up with a good model if they try. (I suggest, $20 for a gigabyte of data transfered in peek times. You may use this suggestion without royalties to me)
Of course it wil be used once in a while on your cell phone, but not often as the screen is too small. Target at folks with only a cell phone and it will flop. Target PDAs and laptops and it will take off.
I have a lot of can't happen checks. They never, or rarely trigger (anymore). I have to maintain code written by someone less paranoid about buggy hardware (for 100 triggered can't happen except on hardware errors, I've fixed 110 software bugs. This on new untested hardware where I have found hardware bugs by other means.
I've also fixed several crashes because I knew the code well enough to know where it should be an what it should be doing. Once I proved it wasn't in that state I had to figgure out why not, and from there the fix was easy. Unfortunatly figgureing out why I was in the wrong state is hard.
Duplicatable problems are easy to fix. If you can crash in one of 5 cases, then splatter printf's all over those areas. Consider writting your own printf which just writes to memory, not the screen so you don't block. Then when your program crashes you pull that memory from the core file and you know where each function was last. just knowing what function each thread was in last is a big clue.
Finially, code inspections are a must. Get some good programers who have never seen that section of code and have them inspect it. If nothing else it will assure that your comments are meaningful before the programmer quits.
A few years back a buddy of mine was forced to "upgrade" his network to NT. He found a OS/2 server in a corner (not walled up) that nobody could remember the admin password to. They were able to determin that several people had their "home directory" on that machine.
I'm using Shlaer-Mellor here at work. UML is our reprsentation, and it works great. What makes it work though is we keep the models up to data. In our case this means our tool turns the UML into our header files. So if you want to modify a header file you have to go into the tool and change the model.
I've never worked with anything else, but others around here have. (booch mostly) They all agree that it didn't work, and the reason is the models got out of date.
So, UML can work great, but you must make sure that that your models stay up to date. Looking at a graphial chart of a "domain" makes it easy to learn the structure of the program when you are maintaining someone else's program. Make the effort (and it is work that you won't like) to keep your models up and it is great, otherwise it is a waste of time.
PS, shlaer-Mellor (and our tool) also allows us to go a step further and generate all the code from a 4gl. This works fine for non-time critical stuff, but for the stuff where speed matters don't use it)
Computers are mostly text based. Indeed the terminal I sit at only has the ability to beep, and it can flash the screen instead if I set it up right. So using the comptuer won't be a problem like it would be for the blind.
For a deaf person you need sign language. Everyone talks about lip reading, but it doesn't work. (Try mouthing "island view" to someone and see what they lip read it as) It takes time to learn a language, be it sign or otherwise. It is good for you. See if the club can bring in an instructor for an hour before/after each meeting.
I personally know enough deaf people that it would be useful to know sign language. There are also times it would be nice to have a conversation without distirbing others. (Ie some of the meetings at work which I have to attend but don't really affect me)
Not really. Computers like 5 volts DC. (3.3 volts and 12 volts are common too). The lower the voltage the less distance it will travel easially. DC didn't lose to AC because it was inefficant at distances, it lost because it is easy to change voltages with AC. The power line outside my house runs several thousand volts. Inside I have 120 volts, which isn't as good for long distances, but safer. Of course we can transform DC voltages today, but it is a lot more complex then AC. 5 volts will not travel the length of your house unless your power wires are as thick as the walls themselves, and you can't afford that.
Tell that do one guy I know who twice put gas in his diesel van. (Accually his wife's van, which he rarely drove) Fortunatly he remembered at about half a tank both times, but he still had to tow it in and get the gas tank flushed for grabing the wrong pump at the gas station - the handle that normally is the right one on his other cars!
Yeah, for people like me. When I drive a car with an automatic I can get started fine, but about the time to shift I automaticly push the clutch, and miss. By the time I remember I don't have to manually shift I've coasted to a stop, and the process starts all over a couple more times. (For a shift lever you just need a sympathetic girl who has her hand in the right spot, and let me move it to the next "gear" from time to time)
Okay, I don't really coast to a stop, but I do attempt a shift and miss. And I have seen my dad reach down by habbit and move mom's hand. (Being a geek I'm not allowed to have a girl myself)
If I have a choice I refuse to drive anything with an automatic, but sometimes I don't.
Sure, but how do I get out? I haven't used them in years, but once upon a time, back when they were new and hadn't yet ran an ad I used them a couple times.
HOW DO I GET OUT OF THEIR SYSTEM! I've tried, there is no obvious way.
Sure, you can save your company $50,000 by using linux of NT, but that is licensing costs. If you have to hire anouther admin because it is more work for your administrators to get their job done, then you haven't saved money.
The cost to hire a compitent administrator are about the same for Linux, NT, other Unix, or anything else. The cost to train someone to do that job is about the same. It doesn't matter if you are using macs, windows, multics, Os/2, linux, solaris, or Os/390, the hard part of administrating the machine isn't learning the job it is knowing how to do it right.
Linux doesn't save any money to a IT shop due to licensing fees becuase windows licesne fees are not that much. However linux can save a lot of money if the machines are set and forget. administrators are the expensive part.
Money is not the most important thing to a bank, it is the ability to get customers their money all the time and accuratly refelect it on their statements. A bank wants to save on comptuer costs only if they are sure the ATMs are working. A phone company cares more about calls getting though then about the cost of comtpuers. I've seen several places with 2 Sun E10ks sitting right next to each other, one a hot standby incase something bad happens to the other. They have a 3rd E10 in a different city they can bring online quickly. They still wouldn't let me re-boot the master e10 despite having backups avaiable just in case. The data was far more important then considerations like computer costs. they told me that 1 minute of lost data is more then the cost of those machines.
Linux isn't a factor because it is free (beer). It might be because it is free (speech). I have seen places with custom linux kernels when they needed it, but that is rare because that same shop had to manually merge in every security patch.
For about $5/month my local phone company will provide me with an ansering machine that will take a message when I'm on the phone with someone else. I can get these messages from any room in my house. (I think I can get them from elsewhere too, but now use a cell phone for all my voice calls so I'm not sure, byond what I see others doing)
Sure you can come up with a linux/windows/mac solution that will work, but when your on the phone with someone else your still out of luck.
Yes, but you don't have the facts exactly straight. Geeks hate marketing because it is in large part about lies and false promisses that we have to fullfill after the fact. Anyone (and this is most geeks with a real job) who has had to rush to put in some baddly designed feature because marketing promissed in and someone bought it understands. Cut the cost down to nothing and then build a great full-featureed system on top of that... I can personally think of several buggy programs that cannot be fixed due to the above, that I have to maintain.
Still we grudgingly admit that if a product fails it is bad marketing, and if it succeddeds it is good marketing. Likewise when a company fails it is because of bad management. (Which often hired the bad marketers) Technology has nothing to do with either, something geeks hate to admit. Linux was a little geek toy that we enjoied for years until marketing got a hold of it. True geeks would be happy to have linux remain a little known geek toy, but marketing recignised some of the things geeks like about linux as good, and they started selling it. (Witness redhat and similear companies that make money marketing linux. Linux doesn't need redhat, though we enjoy the benifits of having them around.)
When a product succeeds it is marketing, when a product fails it is marketing. Success in this case is measured in money, there are other definitions, but they don't pay the bills) Still anyone who has delt with marketing understands why geeks cannot stand marketing.
Well yeah, population/sq meter is small in any country, even Japan. However sweden has about twice the population of my home State (Minnesota), and about the same area. (Not very close, but close enough to get an idea of how things are) So it will be easier to wire your country then my state. There are many states in the US that can claim about the same amount of land as Sweden, but 1/10th the population.
Well, I'm not the telco, so I can't give an offical confermation, but my understanding is there are miles of unused dark fiber.
The reason we don't use it is it doesn't go anywhere we need more capacity. The most expensive part of running fiber is the labor. So when they hire someone to run a fiber line between two offices they don't put in four pieces of fiber (Assuming they need 4), they put in a hundred. If the workers accidently break on fibre line (or there is a defect) there are still 99 potentially good lines to choose from. This leaves a lot of fiber that isn't in use because it is unneeded. If tommorow the telco decides they need more capacity it is very simple for them to add it, just use anouther line.
In theory it is possibal to lease one of these lines and have your own equipment on each end. Problem is they run from telco office to telco office, not to your neighborhood.
Basicly there is a lot of dark fiber because it doesn't cost much to put it in dark fiber so they add redundant capacity. they don't use it because they have no data to put down those lines.
I have a brand new (3 months old) NCD NC900 on my desk. Just a simple X server connected to a Sony flat screen montior, running lots of colors (but not enough, I can still get the old color flash when I change windows if I run the right apps)
The bad news: This system is more expensive then a PIII with a good graphics card running linux. Sure it is quiet (but you can get quiet systems if you try. Underclock, big heat sink, no CPU fan, power supply with an adjustable speed fan. (pc power and cooling will set you up with most of this, and they have good quality - worth the cost) IS doesn't like the PC solution though, as they have to manage it, the NCD costs nothing for them to manage, the PC needs more support. (This even though the PCs we have are just X servers, we run all our applications on Sparcs in the server room)
One option: put the pc on the other side of the wall. This might or might not work for you, but it is an option if your cable lenghts won't get too long and you don't mind the restricive placement.
Oh really? And what makes you think that perpetual care will accually exist byond your time? Sure it will continue for a few years or so, but for how long? Stable goverments for more then 1000 years are rare. I'm not certian that any have made it that long. Future historians interested in the life of people from the 20th century (which will be interesting if they figgure out what we have done, even if it seems primitive by their standards), but they won't have much to go on. CDs hav been claimed to last 100 years, not 1000. Stone in a desert has been proven to last, but climates have been known to change. Indeed if you can find a way to make deserts grow odds are they will become argracultural areas. (Look at Chile, theyhave the dryest desert, no rain in over 500 years, but they irrigate it - who knows what this will do to your tombstone.
Personally I want to be burried in an unmarked grave in the middle of a field. I want my body to become fertialiser. When my soul (whatever you belive, you get the concept) no longer inhabbits my body I don't care what happens to it, if my body can be useful to others, then that is fine with me.
I work in a room with 1 girl for every 5 single guys. Not very good odds. Last week I was in a different room, where there were 4 girls for every guy in the room. (Note, I don't know the marriage status of those people) The latter was in Spain. Both rooms were only have technical people in them. (One was the IS department - not tech support, and the other was programming) So if you are a girl looking to meet guys, going into a technical field in the US is a great plan. If your a guy in the US anything technical is the wrong plan until more girls in the US go into technical fields. (My expirence is they are smart enough to handle it, but they have no interest. I have no idea why) Geek guys who want to meet girls should move to a different counry, there are not many geek girls in the US.
I interviewed with a startup that I'm convinced will not be in buisness in 3 years (still 2 years to go, but i've not been keeping track, in my mind the odds are against them) Find out what kind of finincial situation the company is in. If they are a start up, do they have the capatol to stay in buisness? If not a startup (selling a product), how profitable are they? If they are very profitable (Microsoft, Cisco...) figgure out if they can keep it up. (Juniper networks seems te be better then cisco???, while nothing stands out as a replacemnt for microsoft, but thay can change too) If they are not number one in their field, what are their plans to become number one. Do you belive their plan?
Most companies go out of buisness due to management incompitence, not technical problems. Make sure you trust management to make the right decisions. Remember the right decision is often one you won't like (and they may not like it either), and sometimes it means deciding on the wrong thing now becuase of incomplete information instead of waiting until you know enough to make the right decision. Management that is nice isn't always good enough to make the company succede. If you get stock, or options, this is important, otherwise just make sure they can pay you. If the company ever misses paying anyone, look for a new job, emploiees are the first the be paid if there is any money at all. The only company that cannot be driven out of buisness by anouther in 5 years is goverment supported. Most competing companies are not enough better to do so however.
Most important, convince yourself they will accually pay you for the amount of hours you are willing to work. Personally I'd rather make half the pay I could make, to work 40 hours a week instead of more. My time is worth more to me then they will pay me, I've considered going part time in fact, and haven't only becuase I like the money I'm earning. If you want to live like a king for the few hours your allowed home and not asleep you can work long hours for a lot of pay. Of course you will need to pay a housekeeper and your laundry. I prefer to do that myself, but it means less hours I can work. (If I was paid overtime it wouldn't pay for me to do my own laundry or clean my own toilets, but I'd probably do it anyway just because bad as those jobs are I like the change of pace) There is nothing wrong with working 120 hours a week so long as you know the sacrafices you are making for your pay and are willing for them - you better have a goal for the money you make though.
I have been to interviews where they told me flat out I was expected to work 80 hours a week. They pay was much more then I'm making now, and several people there were willing for it (all of them were investing everything in hopes of retirement - but look what the stock market has done in the last year and it makes more sense why I wasn't willing for that gamble)
Make sure you interview your boss. i've worked for micromanagers, and wouldn't recomend it. For a short time (I transfered out in 4 months) it was okay, but for longer I couldn't. I've worked for managers who had a weekly 3 hour meeting, managers who had 10 minute meetings (and managed to say just as much), and managers who never had meetings when I could attend. The latter sounds like a dream, but it wasn't - My boss didn't see me for weeks one end, and it was hard to get work, hard to know where the company was going, and hard to do my job. Make sure you can get along with your boss. I've worked for excellent bosses with horrid upper management, but my boss shielded me from those problems and since I got my pay check I was okay. A lot of what makes a good boss is personal, so even if I had a sure fire way of finding the perfect boss that doesn't mean it would work for you.
While I belive you can do exactly what you want, ANAL. Every buisness should have a lawyer, even small buisnesses hire one from time to time. Have your boss get you in touch with your lawyers.
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I doupt that. Even at a TB per cubic centimeter you aren't gonna walk out with all their data. Last month I was helping one company that was creating 3 TB of new data a day. Add up a few months of that, and you byond pocket size. This wasn't even a really big company, I've worked with some that do 20 TBs a day.
I won't even mention NASA and the like that can do a few 100 TB a day. (most of which they don't process). And speculations of what the NSA (echolin, however it is spelled) can get in a day aren't worth it. Though the latter is important to consider.
True, but at least with email it is easy to skip the long winded but useless parts.
"Hi hank, this is andrea at extention 123, thanks for getting back to me on the bacon problem, I have one more question: how many cysts are accaptable in a slice?" Said aloud I waste a couple borning minutes before getting to something useful. A reply by voice mail is just as bad because I have to give a summery of the question first. In email I just replay with an answer "5", while in voice mail my reply is "Hello andrea, about your questions about the acceptable limit of cysts in bacon, 5 reasonable limit."
Of course the above example is completely made up. (A engineer who knew a female to talk to should have been your first clue.) You get the idea, voicemail is nice, but it wastes a lot of time with redundancy and boiler plate. Email has the same thing, but you an quickly skip it.
Well, when my mom was in school they got 3 bomb threats in a month. Each was taken seriously, but for the last one they just made all the students stay in the parking lot, and held class (such as they could) outside. they never got anouther bomb threat because it was no longer a way to go home early.
That depends on the phone. All national no roaming phones (in the US) have an analog mode, and very few parts of the Us are not covered by analog. Sure the quality sucks (because the tower is miles away), but there is service. Well, at least along freeways there is service. You see cell phone companies know that travelers are a major source of income, and travelers only get off the main roads to get gas or a meal, so they cheap, towers to cover the freeway and however far out the tower happens to reach. Drive a back road and there is no service, but if you drive a back road you should be equipped to get out anyway.
Well, I don't know about the true poor (that is no money at all), but my expirence is low income folks are more likely to have a cell phone. When you are at the same location a wired phone is cheap and works. When your up in a tree picking fruit one week, and the next berries in anouther town, a cell phone is the only option. When your a carpenter making $12/hour you can't be reach any other way, and probably need a phone often to call for more supplies. (Generally you are not paid for using your personal phone for work either)
Those working at McDonalds might not be able to afford a cell phone, but few people work there who have other options, which generally means out of high school)
Sure you can cut the budget. In fact there isn't a need for any supply rockets. Just grab someone from death row who has exhausted all appeals, send them up with plenty of seed. If he can make anything grow on the moon, good for him, let him leave there forever. If not, he is a criminal who would die anyway, now he gets into history books.
Ahh, but this is about two things: PDAs and laptops.
PDA users will use it for meetings, instead of asking you if you are free for a lunch meeting friday I have my PDA find a time where we are both free to schedual a meeting, and when it says the first lunch where we are both free is a week from tuesday, we know we are both free, and if we accept it, then it is known that we will both be there.
Laptop users will use it for everything, more or less. Just today managers were asking why I wanted an ethernet interface for my laptop. (802.11 is the rule here, but not for customer sites) Give me a good cell phone connection and I will almost never need a wired connection. Of course all this assumes the cost is cheep enough, but I think sprint can come up with a good model if they try. (I suggest, $20 for a gigabyte of data transfered in peek times. You may use this suggestion without royalties to me)
Of course it wil be used once in a while on your cell phone, but not often as the screen is too small. Target at folks with only a cell phone and it will flop. Target PDAs and laptops and it will take off.
I have a lot of can't happen checks. They never, or rarely trigger (anymore). I have to maintain code written by someone less paranoid about buggy hardware (for 100 triggered can't happen except on hardware errors, I've fixed 110 software bugs. This on new untested hardware where I have found hardware bugs by other means.
I've also fixed several crashes because I knew the code well enough to know where it should be an what it should be doing. Once I proved it wasn't in that state I had to figgure out why not, and from there the fix was easy. Unfortunatly figgureing out why I was in the wrong state is hard.
Duplicatable problems are easy to fix. If you can crash in one of 5 cases, then splatter printf's all over those areas. Consider writting your own printf which just writes to memory, not the screen so you don't block. Then when your program crashes you pull that memory from the core file and you know where each function was last. just knowing what function each thread was in last is a big clue.
Finially, code inspections are a must. Get some good programers who have never seen that section of code and have them inspect it. If nothing else it will assure that your comments are meaningful before the programmer quits.
A few years back a buddy of mine was forced to "upgrade" his network to NT. He found a OS/2 server in a corner (not walled up) that nobody could remember the admin password to. They were able to determin that several people had their "home directory" on that machine.
I'm using Shlaer-Mellor here at work. UML is our reprsentation, and it works great. What makes it work though is we keep the models up to data. In our case this means our tool turns the UML into our header files. So if you want to modify a header file you have to go into the tool and change the model.
I've never worked with anything else, but others around here have. (booch mostly) They all agree that it didn't work, and the reason is the models got out of date.
So, UML can work great, but you must make sure that that your models stay up to date. Looking at a graphial chart of a "domain" makes it easy to learn the structure of the program when you are maintaining someone else's program. Make the effort (and it is work that you won't like) to keep your models up and it is great, otherwise it is a waste of time.
PS, shlaer-Mellor (and our tool) also allows us to go a step further and generate all the code from a 4gl. This works fine for non-time critical stuff, but for the stuff where speed matters don't use it)
Computers are mostly text based. Indeed the terminal I sit at only has the ability to beep, and it can flash the screen instead if I set it up right. So using the comptuer won't be a problem like it would be for the blind.
For a deaf person you need sign language. Everyone talks about lip reading, but it doesn't work. (Try mouthing "island view" to someone and see what they lip read it as) It takes time to learn a language, be it sign or otherwise. It is good for you. See if the club can bring in an instructor for an hour before/after each meeting.
I personally know enough deaf people that it would be useful to know sign language. There are also times it would be nice to have a conversation without distirbing others. (Ie some of the meetings at work which I have to attend but don't really affect me)
Not really. Computers like 5 volts DC. (3.3 volts and 12 volts are common too). The lower the voltage the less distance it will travel easially. DC didn't lose to AC because it was inefficant at distances, it lost because it is easy to change voltages with AC. The power line outside my house runs several thousand volts. Inside I have 120 volts, which isn't as good for long distances, but safer. Of course we can transform DC voltages today, but it is a lot more complex then AC. 5 volts will not travel the length of your house unless your power wires are as thick as the walls themselves, and you can't afford that.
Tell that do one guy I know who twice put gas in his diesel van. (Accually his wife's van, which he rarely drove) Fortunatly he remembered at about half a tank both times, but he still had to tow it in and get the gas tank flushed for grabing the wrong pump at the gas station - the handle that normally is the right one on his other cars!
Yeah, for people like me. When I drive a car with an automatic I can get started fine, but about the time to shift I automaticly push the clutch, and miss. By the time I remember I don't have to manually shift I've coasted to a stop, and the process starts all over a couple more times. (For a shift lever you just need a sympathetic girl who has her hand in the right spot, and let me move it to the next "gear" from time to time)
Okay, I don't really coast to a stop, but I do attempt a shift and miss. And I have seen my dad reach down by habbit and move mom's hand. (Being a geek I'm not allowed to have a girl myself)
If I have a choice I refuse to drive anything with an automatic, but sometimes I don't.
Sure, but how do I get out? I haven't used them in years, but once upon a time, back when they were new and hadn't yet ran an ad I used them a couple times.
HOW DO I GET OUT OF THEIR SYSTEM! I've tried, there is no obvious way.
Sure, you can save your company $50,000 by using linux of NT, but that is licensing costs. If you have to hire anouther admin because it is more work for your administrators to get their job done, then you haven't saved money.
The cost to hire a compitent administrator are about the same for Linux, NT, other Unix, or anything else. The cost to train someone to do that job is about the same. It doesn't matter if you are using macs, windows, multics, Os/2, linux, solaris, or Os/390, the hard part of administrating the machine isn't learning the job it is knowing how to do it right.
Linux doesn't save any money to a IT shop due to licensing fees becuase windows licesne fees are not that much. However linux can save a lot of money if the machines are set and forget. administrators are the expensive part.
Money is not the most important thing to a bank, it is the ability to get customers their money all the time and accuratly refelect it on their statements. A bank wants to save on comptuer costs only if they are sure the ATMs are working. A phone company cares more about calls getting though then about the cost of comtpuers. I've seen several places with 2 Sun E10ks sitting right next to each other, one a hot standby incase something bad happens to the other. They have a 3rd E10 in a different city they can bring online quickly. They still wouldn't let me re-boot the master e10 despite having backups avaiable just in case. The data was far more important then considerations like computer costs. they told me that 1 minute of lost data is more then the cost of those machines.
Linux isn't a factor because it is free (beer). It might be because it is free (speech). I have seen places with custom linux kernels when they needed it, but that is rare because that same shop had to manually merge in every security patch.
For about $5/month my local phone company will provide me with an ansering machine that will take a message when I'm on the phone with someone else. I can get these messages from any room in my house. (I think I can get them from elsewhere too, but now use a cell phone for all my voice calls so I'm not sure, byond what I see others doing)
Sure you can come up with a linux/windows/mac solution that will work, but when your on the phone with someone else your still out of luck.
Yes, but you don't have the facts exactly straight. Geeks hate marketing because it is in large part about lies and false promisses that we have to fullfill after the fact. Anyone (and this is most geeks with a real job) who has had to rush to put in some baddly designed feature because marketing promissed in and someone bought it understands. Cut the cost down to nothing and then build a great full-featureed system on top of that... I can personally think of several buggy programs that cannot be fixed due to the above, that I have to maintain.
Still we grudgingly admit that if a product fails it is bad marketing, and if it succeddeds it is good marketing. Likewise when a company fails it is because of bad management. (Which often hired the bad marketers) Technology has nothing to do with either, something geeks hate to admit. Linux was a little geek toy that we enjoied for years until marketing got a hold of it. True geeks would be happy to have linux remain a little known geek toy, but marketing recignised some of the things geeks like about linux as good, and they started selling it. (Witness redhat and similear companies that make money marketing linux. Linux doesn't need redhat, though we enjoy the benifits of having them around.)
When a product succeeds it is marketing, when a product fails it is marketing. Success in this case is measured in money, there are other definitions, but they don't pay the bills) Still anyone who has delt with marketing understands why geeks cannot stand marketing.
Well yeah, population/sq meter is small in any country, even Japan. However sweden has about twice the population of my home State (Minnesota), and about the same area. (Not very close, but close enough to get an idea of how things are) So it will be easier to wire your country then my state. There are many states in the US that can claim about the same amount of land as Sweden, but 1/10th the population.
Well, I'm not the telco, so I can't give an offical confermation, but my understanding is there are miles of unused dark fiber.
The reason we don't use it is it doesn't go anywhere we need more capacity. The most expensive part of running fiber is the labor. So when they hire someone to run a fiber line between two offices they don't put in four pieces of fiber (Assuming they need 4), they put in a hundred. If the workers accidently break on fibre line (or there is a defect) there are still 99 potentially good lines to choose from. This leaves a lot of fiber that isn't in use because it is unneeded. If tommorow the telco decides they need more capacity it is very simple for them to add it, just use anouther line.
In theory it is possibal to lease one of these lines and have your own equipment on each end. Problem is they run from telco office to telco office, not to your neighborhood.
Basicly there is a lot of dark fiber because it doesn't cost much to put it in dark fiber so they add redundant capacity. they don't use it because they have no data to put down those lines.
I have a brand new (3 months old) NCD NC900 on my desk. Just a simple X server connected to a Sony flat screen montior, running lots of colors (but not enough, I can still get the old color flash when I change windows if I run the right apps)
The bad news: This system is more expensive then a PIII with a good graphics card running linux. Sure it is quiet (but you can get quiet systems if you try. Underclock, big heat sink, no CPU fan, power supply with an adjustable speed fan. (pc power and cooling will set you up with most of this, and they have good quality - worth the cost) IS doesn't like the PC solution though, as they have to manage it, the NCD costs nothing for them to manage, the PC needs more support. (This even though the PCs we have are just X servers, we run all our applications on Sparcs in the server room)
One option: put the pc on the other side of the wall. This might or might not work for you, but it is an option if your cable lenghts won't get too long and you don't mind the restricive placement.
Oh really? And what makes you think that perpetual care will accually exist byond your time? Sure it will continue for a few years or so, but for how long? Stable goverments for more then 1000 years are rare. I'm not certian that any have made it that long. Future historians interested in the life of people from the 20th century (which will be interesting if they figgure out what we have done, even if it seems primitive by their standards), but they won't have much to go on. CDs hav been claimed to last 100 years, not 1000. Stone in a desert has been proven to last, but climates have been known to change. Indeed if you can find a way to make deserts grow odds are they will become argracultural areas. (Look at Chile, theyhave the dryest desert, no rain in over 500 years, but they irrigate it - who knows what this will do to your tombstone.
Personally I want to be burried in an unmarked grave in the middle of a field. I want my body to become fertialiser. When my soul (whatever you belive, you get the concept) no longer inhabbits my body I don't care what happens to it, if my body can be useful to others, then that is fine with me.
I work in a room with 1 girl for every 5 single guys. Not very good odds. Last week I was in a different room, where there were 4 girls for every guy in the room. (Note, I don't know the marriage status of those people) The latter was in Spain. Both rooms were only have technical people in them. (One was the IS department - not tech support, and the other was programming) So if you are a girl looking to meet guys, going into a technical field in the US is a great plan. If your a guy in the US anything technical is the wrong plan until more girls in the US go into technical fields. (My expirence is they are smart enough to handle it, but they have no interest. I have no idea why) Geek guys who want to meet girls should move to a different counry, there are not many geek girls in the US.
I interviewed with a startup that I'm convinced will not be in buisness in 3 years (still 2 years to go, but i've not been keeping track, in my mind the odds are against them) Find out what kind of finincial situation the company is in. If they are a start up, do they have the capatol to stay in buisness? If not a startup (selling a product), how profitable are they? If they are very profitable (Microsoft, Cisco...) figgure out if they can keep it up. (Juniper networks seems te be better then cisco???, while nothing stands out as a replacemnt for microsoft, but thay can change too) If they are not number one in their field, what are their plans to become number one. Do you belive their plan?
Most companies go out of buisness due to management incompitence, not technical problems. Make sure you trust management to make the right decisions. Remember the right decision is often one you won't like (and they may not like it either), and sometimes it means deciding on the wrong thing now becuase of incomplete information instead of waiting until you know enough to make the right decision. Management that is nice isn't always good enough to make the company succede. If you get stock, or options, this is important, otherwise just make sure they can pay you. If the company ever misses paying anyone, look for a new job, emploiees are the first the be paid if there is any money at all. The only company that cannot be driven out of buisness by anouther in 5 years is goverment supported. Most competing companies are not enough better to do so however.
Most important, convince yourself they will accually pay you for the amount of hours you are willing to work. Personally I'd rather make half the pay I could make, to work 40 hours a week instead of more. My time is worth more to me then they will pay me, I've considered going part time in fact, and haven't only becuase I like the money I'm earning. If you want to live like a king for the few hours your allowed home and not asleep you can work long hours for a lot of pay. Of course you will need to pay a housekeeper and your laundry. I prefer to do that myself, but it means less hours I can work. (If I was paid overtime it wouldn't pay for me to do my own laundry or clean my own toilets, but I'd probably do it anyway just because bad as those jobs are I like the change of pace) There is nothing wrong with working 120 hours a week so long as you know the sacrafices you are making for your pay and are willing for them - you better have a goal for the money you make though.
I have been to interviews where they told me flat out I was expected to work 80 hours a week. They pay was much more then I'm making now, and several people there were willing for it (all of them were investing everything in hopes of retirement - but look what the stock market has done in the last year and it makes more sense why I wasn't willing for that gamble)
Make sure you interview your boss. i've worked for micromanagers, and wouldn't recomend it. For a short time (I transfered out in 4 months) it was okay, but for longer I couldn't. I've worked for managers who had a weekly 3 hour meeting, managers who had 10 minute meetings (and managed to say just as much), and managers who never had meetings when I could attend. The latter sounds like a dream, but it wasn't - My boss didn't see me for weeks one end, and it was hard to get work, hard to know where the company was going, and hard to do my job. Make sure you can get along with your boss. I've worked for excellent bosses with horrid upper management, but my boss shielded me from those problems and since I got my pay check I was okay. A lot of what makes a good boss is personal, so even if I had a sure fire way of finding the perfect boss that doesn't mean it would work for you.
While I belive you can do exactly what you want, ANAL. Every buisness should have a lawyer, even small buisnesses hire one from time to time. Have your boss get you in touch with your lawyers.