As once-loyal listeners tune away, most AM stations are barely holding onto life, slashing staff and budgets as deeply as they can while struggling to find a return to profitability. Once upon a time, having a broadcast license of any kind was like having a permit to print money. In today’s world, that's no longer true.
But, with 10,000 AM broadcast towers in the United States, stretching high into the sky, there may be an opportunity for wireless carriers who don't want to argue with community opposition from neighborhoods where residents don't want yet another cell tower. The amount of money an AM station owner can pocket by sharing its tower with a wireless partner varies widely, depending on the tower's location, height, and several other factors. But it's certainly more income — and a way to keep "old" technology from becoming obsolete.
Ron, an IT admin, summarizes the situation succinctly: “More like applied, applied another, removed, I think re-applied, I give up, and have no clue where I am anymore.”
Feel like you're alone? Here's what other sysadmins have done so far, as well as their current plans and long-term strategy, not to mention how to communicate progress to management.
A DSTG team led by mathematician Dr. Neil Gordon set about developing a new technique to extract a path from a subset of the Inmarsat data called the Burst Timing Offset (BTO). This measured how quickly the aircraft responded each time the satellite pinged it, and was used to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane. Investigators used these calculations to draw a set of rings on the earth’s surface.
...The DSTG used its computers to generate a huge number of possible routes and then test them to see which best fit the observed data. Their endpoints were pooled to generate a probabilistic “heat map” of the plane’s most likely resting places using a technique called Bayesian analysis. These calculations allowed the DSTG team to draw a box 400 miles long and 70 miles across, which contained about 90 percent of the total probability distribution.
Cool stuff, even if we still don't know where the plane ended up.
The nearly 2,000 developers across the Federal Reserve System used to have a disparate set of developer tools. Now, they benefit from a standard toolset and architecture, which also places limits on which applications the bank will consider using. “We don’t want a third-party application that isn’t compatible with our common architecture,” said Wynd.
But the advantages are more than technical. Among them: "Developers can now take on projects or switch jobs more easily across Federal Reserve banks because the New York Fed uses a lot of common open source components and a standard tool set, meaning retraining is minimal if needed at all."
Like microservices, SOA is predicated on a distributed architecture that's more scalable and flexible than traditional monolithic architectures. Most important, perhaps, is that distributed architectures such as SOA are more hospitable to the kinds of modular applications that make life easier for agile developers.
SOA was a real thing, beyond the "they can never find a good way to define it" problem. Do you think it's coming back around, but with better buzzwords?
All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
