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Comment What other explanation? (Score 1) 663

When my local school system, here in North Carolina, had consistently sick students, they temporarily closed the school down, did a thorough toxic sweep. When they did infact find biological factor, primarily as a part of the centralized air and heating system, they closed the school indefinitely until the entire school could be rehabbed. That meant the offending ac/heating system had to be replaced, old carpet ripped up and replaced, the school scrubbed down completely, and any other materials that could have been exposed or otherwise allow any fungus or bacteria to fester was destroyed.

I doubt wireless is making their school children sick, I could be wrong, but they need to look a little bit closer.

Comment Well, this is how we do it (Score 1) 688

At my job, we have a mix of department shorthand+username or dept shorthand+position/number. The main IT group is getting ready to implement serial number based naming conventions for the desktops and laptops. We are a primarily Dell office so that would mean the ServiceTag, which is short, but it can still be confusing and a little too much. However, I guess it helps ID a computer without even having to turn it on. I don't know if they are extending this though to network printers, servers (named based off of streets in our city), etc. I prefer a department in shorthand and ID# my self.

Comment Ham radio is needed (Score 1) 343

I am not saying ham radio is needed just because I am a licensed operator, but because every time a disaster or communications failure occurs, ham radio is most often the only people that can communicate for emergenency services/coordination and the general public to pass traffic (such as wellness) and other important information. Even just to let a family member know another member or group are ok (or vice versa). Remember the cable cuts in California ealier this year? Disabled a lot of communications, even emergency services groups (police, 911, etc). ARES (amateur radio emergency servicess) was called out in full effect to provide comm for the entire length of the comm outage.

Comment First off... (Score 1) 601

Go see a doctor. Have you ever had concentration issues before? Did you often procrastinate on projects in school? Or did it get worse over time? If you have medical benefits, go see a doctor first before you try anything that could give you more problems.

Comment UNIX, oh yeah! (Score 1) 254

It feels kind of good that, at 26 years old, I am using an IBM flavor of UNIX (AIX) that runs great and of which the core is older than I am. I remember seeing System V books at my mom's old job when she use to work for AT&T and Lucent Technologies. Go UNIX!

Comment But of course... (Score 1) 306

Of course software engineering and computer science are different, but only in the sense that a square is a rectangle but not all rectangles are squares. Computer science goes FAR beyond software development/engineering and maintenance; and no I don't mean general information technology. For example, the hardest part of producing software comes before the development phase, solving the problem. Any engineer or team of engineers can take a solution and turn it into code but if they have no solution, it does not matter how much they know about .NET, JAVA, php, or whatever, they will sit around like every other person beating their heads about how to apply their discipline. There is no argument here. You have excellent computer scientist that can solve problems but aren't very code savvy (and don't really need to be) and you have software developers that can take a solution and bust out code as if they were acing some simple test. You then have people that can do both.

Comment Interesting (Score 1) 73

I never really though of it like that, interesting. Over the past many years that functional commercial, government, and other types of satellites have been put into orbit, there has been a huge network of underutilized satellites. That is, in the sense that many operational satellites are backups or can handle additional traffic within their bandwidth. The multi-GHz bands (such as the high L-band and Ku-Band up through Ka-Band) are inundated with lots and lots of satellites. As companies change services, fold, get acquired, or sell or lease their satellites, services can be changed easily instead of launching new satellites. However, many of these satellites too, are going out of service for various reasons. Some were rendered useless the day they were launched, lending to the piles of useless stuff up there. I do not believe that creating a few large satellites to cover many services is a great idea. Of course, it depends on who is controlling the satellites, but my concern is the vulnerability of fewer satellites.

Comment What else is new? (Score 1) 469

This information is nothing new, honestly. We've seen people literally stay up for several days, and then die. We've seen people sleep a few hours here and a few hours there and then die. Lack of sleep is extremely dangerous. Nothing new and then you have people that like to pop Adderall on a regular basis. These people are scary after they've been up for more than a couple of days on stuff like that. Do your self a favor and GO TO SLEEP!

Comment Re:Try this. Make a GERMAN war game (Score 1) 295

There have been plenty of EXCELLENT German POV war games and shooters. In defense of the common German soldier, sailor, and pilot, many of them did not know fully what they were fighting for. Of course, you could argue that the cause was protection of their homeland through domination of their adjacent foes. The holocaust is not the issue here. Most German soldiers likely never saw a single concentration or death camp. The German military, as it stood, was NO different than the Russians, Americans, British, French (except for their propensity to give up), Italian, or Japanese military. The soldiers followed orders, they had to survive, and they had to deal with stress, death and destruction, not seeing their friends and family. Some of them were conscripted (drafted) into a war they cared nothing for. No nation in WWII was innocent of some form of unacceptable atrocity.

Comment So be it (Score 1) 97

I am glad we have put BPL to rest, at least for now. I have seen the video demonstrations from hams (I am an amateur operator my self) driving around the BPL test sites showing the kind of interference caused with these systems. I also work for a water utility. There is no need for power companies to spend truck loads of money just to read meters. They can setup, easily, radio read meters where a very few number of people can drive around and read OR a wireless mesh network in which NO ONE has to leave the office unless a transmitter is not working properly. With that said, the power companies were not the biggest pushers, the FCC was and Michael Powell (at the time) and his chronies were trying to appease the idea to bring broadband to EVERYONE but with little forethought. The U.S. should have been and already have, by now, a national wireless internet service. BPL is gone, thank you to the ARRL, let's move on.

Comment Well... (Score 1) 180

Careful, at some point there was the possibility for DNF to be completed. I remember seeing TV commercials about it but it just never happened. I never saw a single TV commercial for Blizzard's Starcraft: Ghost, and you know what, that game never happened. So if you see a commercial for Duke Nukem Forever, after the great success of Duke Nukem 3D, and playing Duke Nukem 1 and 2 (side scrollers) as a kid for hours, what would you think....THEY'RE MAKING DUKE NUKEM FOREVER. Fast forward quite a few years, we've passed through many iterations of Half-Life, id Software was reborn and moved on, the Unreal team moved on, Call of Duty was rediculous, computers for the most part, all but lost the gaming wars and that is only because games like WoW exist on the computer.

Comment Re:Awesome (Score 1) 242

This seems like a great idea, until you realize that any american geek who prods too deeply will be branded an enemy combatant.

Who knows what happens to enemy combatants.

Make them watch Hackers and Antitrust over and over again, until they crash and burn, then we'll pull out the old Prodigy internet service and make them use it at 2400 baud... much worse than AOL at 9600.

Comment Re:They're actually onto something. (Score 1) 79

The issue comes down to bandwidth. The higher the frequency, the more you can do with it. The entire radio spectrum is extremely valuable, especially below 50MHz in the VHF "low band" area around 40 MHz and even getting into HF mixed in with the 10 and 11 meter wavelengths where military has some stuff. These frequencies all over the charts have ups and downs of use. Some are great for long distance communication with out the use of satellites but they have lower bandwidth. The higher ones don't skip off the atmosphere or ground very well but have higher bandwidth and some are actually pretty good about penetrating buildings, bending over geographic features such as hills and small mountain areas. So Google is insterested in 300MHz and higher because anything less than that is practically useless. Also, there are major rebanding projects going on for 800MHz public safety systems to "free up" more space for other use. We ham operators cherish our UHF, particularly the mid-400MHz area and many of us would like to get into 900MHz but there is little or no real consumer ham gear made for 33cm (900MHz) and we must rely on potentially pricey commercial radios and repeater equipment to make use of it effective. We also have spectrums well into the GHz arena. Just leave ham radio alone and we'll be alright.

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