emcrazyone

I can relate. My mother hoards old magazines thinking someday she will need the information in them. She hoards magazines, reader's digest books, you name it.

Before my father died, he kept her in check. Throwing piles of old news papers out. Growing up it was a common scene to hear her yell at him that he threw something out she needed.

My mother use to write a news letter for a government agency. She is a very good, articulate writer. She is so good that one time I was suffering through a creative writing college course, came home got some help from my mom, and the college professor told me I had a career in journalism if I didn't like engineering. It was a family joke for many years.

I have a little bit of this myself. My wife yells at me to get rid of things. History repeats itself... I take broken electronics apart for their parts. Kids toys break, toy gets put on my work bench. I eventually get around to taking it apart to harvest parts like LCD panels, MMC slots, etc...

I'm getting better. I realize some when I blow dust off of it, it's time to throw out.

I think it's a mental thought process that what you have has some value to you. Not like value as in it is worth something to someone else but a cost saving thing. I would rather use a harvested MMC or LED than go to Digikey and buy a bag of them and wait a day or few for it to arrive. The value is in having instant access to it while on a project. At least that is how it is for me.

I took antenna theory in college for a couple years and then worked in the automotive field designing in-glass antenna systems for cars in the 1990s for a few years.

It has been a few years but reading the article I couldn't help but recall some of my college courses and how I was able to apply some of what I learned in college to the state of the art at the time.

We use to have to drive cars by a local glass company to have the rear window removed and taped back in until I got to the office. Once at the office I would lay the glass on a metal frame and layout an antenna using gold conducting tape. Put the windshield back into the car and blast it with network spectrum analyzer.

Antenna's have both a theoretical wave length and an actual wave length as measured through the medium you're radiating from.

We had loads of conduit in our work shop so one day I managed to grab a couple pieces of conduit and made some rough back of the napkin calculations to convert the theoretical wave length to an actual wave length for metal conduit. My work was for AM and FM radio in the 88-108MHz.

One day a customer comes into the office who knew me well from many visits and saw me hack sawing a piece of conduit with a wire hanging off the side. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was calibrating an antenna.

We were a start up so we had to make due with stuff lying around.

I couldn't help but read the article and wonder how the dielectric mentioned would effectively shorten the wavelength. Wave length in a medium can be thought of the effort to push back and forth the electrons to radiate.

Another analogy is it's easier to wave your hand in air than it is in water; water being akin to the dielectric. A dielectric with 60% efficiency seems more material science than electrical engineering.

Interesting work. Curious what materials they use or perhaps going to higher frequencies.

huh, I thought all of NGINX was open source and so I'm confused by the title "NGINX open sources TCP load balancing."

Just a bad title or am I missing something?

he can't pay income tax if he's never received the income.

"I will be left with a tax bill on $10,000s of additional "income" that I never received"

"The capital investment issues the ISPs face have nothing to do with interconnect -- their dollars are spent in the last mile."

So very true. I'm an ISP owner. The other factor is peering agreements over those last miles but, yes, totally agree.

maybe. I like to think we suck less than other H1Bs by providing more perks. It's a dog-eat-dog world my friend and in the US, you have a choice. If you don't like it, stay in your native land then is all I can say.

Don't blame us for leveraging what is legal and allowed by economics. I do this part time through an entity I setup with a partner who is from India. He recently returned to India so we could open a site there where we can off shore work. Pumping work into those areas seems like a good thing to me. In addition, the Indian government gives free land if we open offices and/or buy buildings there too.

very true. I offer a lot of benefits over other similar companies. Many times I am involved in moving a contract because I will give more of the bill rate.

I also offer a family package. You would not believe how many H1Bs I get that want to leave their L1 status because they want to move for various reasons. Marriage being the one I get the most.

When a contract ends, I will put H1Bs on internal work for as long as I can but the liquidity of this area is such that I hardly go past a month or two for any given candidate.

I own a company that specializes in hiring H1Bs and placing them into contract roles.

The data doesn't look very accurate. For one thing, this data doesn't appear to represent what companies pay.

I usually get bill rates up around $100/hr to $150/hr depending on skill and location. Like New York has higher cost of living than Michigan so I can often pull a higher bill rate.

The payout to the H1B is works out to be $60K to $80K. An Oracle DBA working in New York will make about $80K which is roughly $38/hour and the company easily pays $125/hour for 6 month contract.

I have some overhead but it's usually a one time fee such as transferring H1B from one company to mine, legal paper work to renew, attain, and transfer H1Bs runs me about $500/piece.

same situation here. I convinced my mother to just get an Android based tablet and ditch the laptop. This seems to be working better for her & me :)

The problem with whiping a brand new computer and installing your own will not necessarily void warranty but if you have a problem like something is not working, technical support will tell you to restore the system.

Many new systems now don't even come with original software disks requiring you to backup the machine using preinstalled crapware to create a backup DVD.

This was the case with a couple of laptops I purchased in the past three years; one of which was a Toshiba.

Years ago, when you purchased a machine, you got driver disk separately and even now I'm seeing a trend where that's becoming less the case.

At least this has been my experience.

I have a bathroom where the water pipes pass through an outside wall. On nights where the temperature goes below 0 degrees F, I open the cabinet door under the sink so heat can get in there. My thermostat is programmed to drop to 60 degrees F at night but because the thermostat is across the house, our downstairs bathroom gets very cold. It's on a slab too. Pipes always freeze if we forget to prop the door open and the temps get down below or in the single digits.

I had been thinking of getting one of those wires you put on the pipe to keep it from freezing but it's behind a wall and very hard to get too...

Yes, I'm thinking of doing just that. I'm sure the neighbors complained about the eye sore and so they used an ordinance to force me to take it down. So, yes, moving to the roof I think might work.

Would you mind posting a link to the ones that look like shingles?

there is no HOA. The township sent me a letter saying it violated some ordinance about affixing stuff to the ground like a flag pole. It was affixed to the ground with a solar panel on top of the pole. I've contemplated moving the panel to the roof of the shed where I think they wouldn't have an argument then.

@Scaevolus so very true. I use to work in this field. I was the IT director for a small pharmaceutical company that produced prescription creams and ointments and worked with a nearby university to work on new drugs.

My role was to develop the custom software that ran on laptops we gave to hospitals involved in the clinical trial. In the drug manufacturing world, anytime computer software is used in a clinical trial or in the tracking of drug production, you have to have the software validated.

Software validation is basically a process by which you hire an outside company to go over what your software does. Similar to an ISO certification. The folks & companies you hire are very clueless... They know enough buzz words to ask good questions but they often over look things.

Anyway, long story short, the whole process of just collecting data is riddled with security problems. None of this, as far as I know, is exposed to the public either. So if buggy software is, somehow, corrupting test results, there is not feedback loop to correct or discard the data. Companies like the one I worked for at the time, would throw out the data as a policy and start over. Hence, very expensive situation and very crucial to make sure your systems do the right thing the first time.

This was in the late 90s and in one situation I was in charge of some software that we were developing that was expected run past Y2K. Back then there was a lot of hoopla about the Y2K century roll over and what it would do to computer systems.

The company we hired validated our software for Y2K use cases but they often over looked basic things like data encryption, plain text storage of user passwords, etc...

I imagine the validation companies have gotten better over the years but in the end I learned that software validation is nothing more than a big CYA tactic. It's a paper trail to try and claim we did our due diligence if the shit were to hit the fan.

agree. Also, you need to heat your house here in Michigan if you don't want your water pipes to freeze... or your kid's pet cockatiel to die or suffer.

my Chrysler Town & Country van has 110v outlets in the rear of the van. Occasionally, we trip the breaker but for the most part it works rather well too.

Curious... I live in suburbia where putting solar panels on one's domicile would most likely be met with an order to remove or fines.

I had an experimental panel in my backyard to provide power to a work shop shed. The shed was there when I purchased the property & house. About 6 months after planting a pole in the ground, behind the shed, but in view to my neighbors garnered a letter from the township where I live that basically said to remove it for being an eye sore.

Has anyone else ran into this problem?

A lot of companies, like where I work, purchase boards like this as a reference implementation. Ultimately at least for us, FCC and CE become conformance studies against our own product in this case.

But I could see this being a problem for companies reselling these boards inside some product they put out.

I can except down votes; I just know it's folks who don't know how an ISP works - sort of a personal indicator of how ill informed a lot of people are on how things really work.

I actually own two companies. One is an ISP and the other is a PCO (Private Cable Operator) where I provide Internet over DOCSIS along with CableTV. I also have had experience dealing with right of way like utilities for putting fiber in the ground, and public WIFI.

I promise you my support costs per man-hour are much higher than your electric company or water utility; not to mention a homeowner can do most troubleshooting their self. Any schmuck can flick a breaker and turn a wrench and at a minimum it can be explained over the phone what to look for or what to smell for.

but it's not so easy when you need to understand tools like Cisco routers, BGP filters, DNS (nslookup) outputs, some dude has a virus or, worst, a torrent... NAT, DNAT setup on some brain dead Linksys routers, the list goes on.

Supplying Internet to people is an endless battle of convincing them, at times, it's their machine. You just don't have this with utilities that are either on/off, flowing or not. Rolling a truck to investigate, I just don't find as many skilled IT people as you do plumbers and electricians and it cost more to train IT people too.

We have one property that is Section-8 housing (don't ask). We supply them CableTV along with Internet. Learned the hardware this was a mistake. You have the I know it all type who will yell at my techs. even has his own cable modem running Linux, you have the crybaby type who complains her internet is too slow and pleads for us to come fix her computer, then you have the old people who don't know how to turn on a computer. These issues don't exist with utility companies. You don't have to educate end users about how water flows through a pipe, or how to flip a circuit breaker...

See with utilities, it's not that hard to figure out what the customer is complaining about REALLY. With IT/Internet, you have things that can become problems for other people. Someone running a torrent in apartment 1B, for example, can cause someone in apartment 1A to call and say the Internet is out. Of course we have ways to track this, but the equipment is expensive and it cost considerably more to teach someone how to configure a Cisco router for traffic profiling, how to look at SNMP reports, MPLS bandwidth reports, etc...

Please tell me how gas, electric, or even water has a challenge nearly as close or as costly on a per/person basis?

this is a ridiculous comparison. You can't compare water, gas, and electrics to the likes of providing Internet. Gas, electric, water are either on or off. Internet connections come with tons of setup pitfalls. A bad DNS can make it appear your Internet is out in one way, while a broken cable inside the house can make it look broken another way and a virus on a computer is another.

It's just not a simple check and you're not going to find people to fix your internet with a proverbial wrench. When is the last time your water pipe had a virus? It will often taken digging into the problem with a fair bit of domain knowledge. And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too.

Every time this topic comes up, people like to try and compare it to the utilities services and you just can't.

1000% agree. I was out having fun one night with some friends in my younger years. We left a bar together and split up. As I and one of the guys I was with entered a parking structured, my other friends drove up to us in a convertible car. They were laughing at me because my fly was down so I pulled it up in a funny gesture as I approached them.

At that point, two cops pulled in behind me and thought I was passing drugs. They looked around on the ground and patted me down and when they found nothing, they trump up some charges and said I indecently exposed myself. When the case went to court, the cops were caught lying. They tried to tell the judge I flashed some girls in a convertible but video showed they lied through their teeth.

So I have my own personal story but don't listen to me, hear what this professor and an ex-cop have to say about talking to the police.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

Back in the 90s I use to install 2 way Earth Stations for Hughes. An Earth station is basically a box that puts TCP/IP over Satellite. They are installed in many gas stations in the US. If you drive down the street and see a white dish on the roof, chances are my company did the install ;) These links handle credit card transactions for paying at the pump and they also handle lottery purchases.

The industry wasn't regulated very much until a situation in which some installers aiming dishes for EDJ (Edward Jones Financials) were knock things off line by aiming dishes at wrong satellites. I don't know much about how the technology works but it became apparent that aiming a dish at the wrong "bird" as we call them could interfere with others.

The EDJ thing was big news back in the day although a google search turns up nothing. It reportedly knocked Edward Jones off line for something close to a week while many were deployed to go and re-aim satellite dishes.

After this incident, the FCC got more involved and now to install a two way satellite dish, you have to take a course and pass it. My whole team was required to go through this training.

We also installed 2 way satellite internet for a company out of Canada that had a PCI card you plugged into your PC. The PCI card would then connect to the dish transmitter and LNB. The down speed was around 4-5Mb/s while the up speed was very slow at around 128Kb/s. I forget the name of the company but they had a proprietary driver for the PCI card that compressed the TCP packets in order to deal with the huge latency of traveling up to space and back down. They also had patents on a modified TCP/IP stack whereby they could locally ACK outbound TCP packets to improve throughput (as it was explained to me at the time).

I'm not a conspiracy theory type but I wonder how much was declassified vs. how much was not. Do you wonder if this is the mundane stuff the US Air Force releases to be able to give them an argument against UFO phenomenon?

I loosely follow this subject. I get excited when guys like Stanton Friedman speak. I got real interested in this subject when the whole Rendlesham Forest thing exploded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

And even Niel Armstrong believes. Wasn't there an unencrypted radio communication that was recorded between NASA and one of the space shuttle missions where the astronautes describe a UFO being observed of some sort?

All this just makes me wonder how much is not declassified or if it is declassified that it's probably down played as something other than a UFO???

I don't, yet, trust you. What are you doing to provide some confidence that my name & amazon wish list won't be sold...

I use a similar site for building computers.

www.pcpartpicker.com and I love these guys. I use to go straight to NewEgg but after finding pcpartpicker, I now go there first. I'm not sure how they monetize the site but they won me over by not requiring me to sign up.

I'm too lazy to create a one off email address just to see if the site is worth it or not.

Also, I couldn't tell from your site if it's possible to enter a SKU and have the site notify me of where I could purchase it and what price history there was on it which I think would be awfully cool.

As an example, I really want to purchase a festool router but these are considered the best-of-the-best and their price reflects this and so in a manual way, I've been watching their prices on a couple web sites for sales.

Love the concept and everything else about the idea!

Another idea is if you can find users who all want to buy the same thing and see if you can leverage this to get volume discounts. I recently been playing with a site called massdrop that attempts to pull this off.

@daxelrod: Wow, thanks for that. Quite interesting. I always wondered about how that was done and if it was a direct conversion of sorts but I guess it's not. Very interesting.

I just have to ask: How do you know this?

@eloisant: I work in automotive where I deal with translations for automotive clusters for one of the largest auto makers. Automotive companies are going to what are called reconfigurables which is basically an instrument cluster with no mechanical gauges; just a screen with gauges rendered by 3D engine. Center stacks too.

I kid you not, the way we translate is to use Google translate as a first pass and then the screens get reviewed by people who know the language. I guess somethings slip through and we evidently pissed off a lot of Chinese folks because of a similar flub. The folks doing the first pass don't know any other languages.

It's quite comical but also a real pain. One of the things I had to work into our code was the left-to-right vs. the right-to-left; you would think it would be just a C-style string but we have to know for text justification semantics.

I don't actually do translations but work on the HMI where the text is displayed. Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space.

@rifleman44 ha! I was thinking the same thing. The tree looks like it has a small trunk. I was thinking there can't be 100 rings and if there were, it would be the whole tree.

I'm Mr. Skeptical... It's hard to believe with the tree growth and over a hundred years of weather that the gun stayed propped up like that. It does look a little wedged between two trunks but wow...

You're not alone. I agree with you and a very wealthy friend of mine who owns his own company bought an MRI machine for his employees and had it installed in the building he owns.

You should doubt everything when it comes to your life. Question everything and leave no stone un-turned.

I know this first hand. Doctors, very smart, just don't know everything. You really have to bone up on whatever is ailing you and really shop the knowledge base that is out there.

@jepper I agree with your comments and to add to what you said, what really stuck out for me was how receptive the doctors were to his analysis. I didn't pick up any kind of resistance by the medical professionals to this guy's analysis.

Also, I have a chronic condition and this comment from the article is just so true.

"Scott’s recent thyroid surgery had taught them that getting the best care requires being proactive and extremely well informed. "