For a most awesome lair! THIS HOUSE is available for sale! It even comes with its own runway!

Spider Robinson was given the honor of completing Robert Heinlein's last known novel, Variable Star. An excellent read created from a manuscript that publishers rejected, so Heinlein packed it away with the intent of completing it at a later date. The story was originally written during Heinlein's adventure story phase, before he got into experimental social fiction. Robinson did an excellent job capturing Heinlein's style, and mixing in a bit of Heinlein's later style.

Robinson is currently working on a sequel to Variable Star called Orphan Stars.

Another one of my favorite series! Courtesy of Baen Books, you can download Berserker Throne for free.

If you are a fan of hard science fiction, your collection is not complete without this series!

I always enjoyed Schmitz's The Witches of Karres. Courtesy of Baen Books, you can read the first few chapters for free here

Baen Books also maintains a library of free book, Baen Free Library. I say this is worth a look.

There used to be an old yarn about being an engineer at Apple. If you were on the elevator and happened to be lucky/unlucky enough that Steve Jobs stepped onto the elevator with you, by the time the elevator reached your floor you would either have been promoted or fired. Whether true or not, it was very well known that Steve Jobs was very tough and demanding on engineers. He would routinely prowl through the engineering departments to surprise people with spot checks.

For creative people, this kind of intrusion can be very disruptive -- even the possibility can keep someone from entering "flow state", the scientific term for a mental state creative people enter when they are at their most creative and productive. This in turn, creates a great deal of stress on an individual.

So, a few years ago, not long after Apple added Bluetooth to their computers, another story began to circulate. Jobs started noticing that his surprise spot checks didn't seem to be as much as a surprise as he thought. Engineers would be conveniently on a coffee break, stepping out to go to the bathroom, etc. For some odd reason or another, they just wouldn't be at their desks when he thought they would be. It wasn't just engineering. The effect began to spread to other departments in the company. Jobs began to suspect something after a while, but couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Eventually, the "something" became so widespread, that it was due that someone would slip up, and Jobs discovered what was going on. One of the engineers wrote a program that would listen for the bluetooth transponder in a cellphone and query its serial number. Then, by propagating the program onto computers throughout the company, the system would track Jobs by the serial number of his cellphone via bluetooth. Every time Jobs walked past a computer with the software on it, the computer would send out a signal showing Jobs' position within the company, and that was displayed on a window on any computer listening for the signal. This way, engineers knew when Jobs was on the prowl, where he was, where he was going, and they would know when to clear out to avoid getting blistered by the boss!

The legend ends with Jobs ordering that the software be removed and the engineer who came up with it was given a raise for creative thinking outside the box.

Are there any Apple engineers out there that can prove or disprove the validity of this tale? I did a quick search on Google, but came up bupkis.

I can say that in all the cases I listed above, there were absolutely no H-1B workers involved. In fact, I never worked with anyone who was an H-1B until the last lab I worked. While they were all quite competent, it was abundantly clear that the management of the lab hired them as a tax dodge. (In fact, the management of the company were all H-1Bs as well!)

In all my cases, one thing was obvious: the unabashed greed of the C-level management. By laying people off, they get a "bonus" that usually exceeded the money saved by the layoffs by at least 10%. Which means the company could easily have kept those people employed, rather than dumping them onto the taxpayers. The Republicans in the U.S. government gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy, claiming that these people were the ones in charge of companies and were the ones who would create jobs. As the ultimate insult to the American citizens, they started calling the rich the "Productive Class." They are NOT the productive class! They are the Parasitic Class. They have created no jobs whatsoever -- indeed, they have actually accelerated the job losses in order to take that money that could have gone to jobs and pocketed it themselves. All the parasitic class has done is suck wealth and productivity out of the economy.

Another issue is that a lot of the business-focused, mid-level management doesn't like hiring true experts because they realize that the new hire could easily replace them in their job. And just as bad are the mid- to high-level management that goes into Save-My-Own-Ass mode. While in school, I worked for a retail chain called Lechmere -- a store chain that Best Buy modeled itself after. The individual who was the regional sales manager for their photography sales started pumping hundreds of cheap, awful photo albums on us to sell. We were going rapidly out of stock of the items that customers actually wanted to buy. We figured out how to game the computer system and force shipment of the vital things that customers wanted to buy. Our sales started skyrocketing. When reported there was a problem in the inventory system and how to work around it, he told our direct manager to stop it or she would be fired immediately. So we did so. As a result, the things people wanted disappeared from our inventory, and stores were flooded with these awful photo albums that no one wanted to buy. Then we discovered what was really happening.

The photo albums had a margin of 45%. Things that people wanted, such as lens filters, lenses, and cameras, at best had markups of 15% to 20%. Lechmere was about to be bought out by a new owner. So, this individual was basically showing them a spreadsheet that demonstrated he was bringing in a 40% profit margin in sales. Sadly, that was 40% in margin in only a couple thousand dollars a week in sales, instead of 20% in margin on the over $75,000 per week that the department was capable of doing in that one store alone. That SMOA attitude was rampant among the mid- and high-level management in Lechmere. They gutted the very thing that made the store chain successful -- expert sales people -- in order to make themselves look good. It was so bad, Lechmere went bankrupt.

Another nasty attitude that has become a plague in American businesses is the managerial attitude, "You can be replaced!" There is truth to that. Employees can be replaced. Business managers to think that employees who are afraid for their jobs are somehow more productive. But, an employee who is stressed over the possibility that he may lose his job is more likely to be sending out resumes than putting in extra effort. The attitude comes from the office where business trained people are easy to replace. Well, it is significantly easier and cheaper to replace someone in the business side of a company than it is to replace an engineer or designer. Then there are those individuals who can NOT be replaced. Nearly all of those who cannot be replaced are those who are in engineering or development. You lose one of them, and you lose your company's ability to develop product. (Again, Motorola vs. Intel is a good example.)

It is very costly to get one of these people to come back or replace them when you lose them. In my initial post, the one company that placed me in an alcove in the hall? They asked me to come back. I told them I wanted double my salary and a private office. They said no. So did I. A few years later, during a trade show I ran into one of my former managers from that company. I learned that the company had to hire five people to fill the functions that I did. All of them at much higher salaries what they paid me. Even then, it was months before they were up to speed and they never quite meshed with the task. They lacked my interdisciplinary and communication abilities. What I could do in days or even hours, took them weeks. The company even had to hire a manager to manage them. While they were eventually able to replace my functionality, they never quite were able to match my productivity. Because I knew what the baseline salaries were for engineers and managers in that company, compared to what they were paying me I knew that it was costing them over twenty times in salary what they were paying me originally. Knowing the projects that were being developed, I can guess that the company probably missed between $2 million to $3 million per year for a couple of years in missed profits due to delays.

It would have been a lot cheaper for them to have doubled my salary and put a desk in a closet for me. Heck, I would have been happy with a cubicle!

In over twenty years working in prototype development, I saved for being laid off instead of retirement. Anytime there was a hiccup in the economy, the first thing that management would cut from was R&D and product development. The mentality of a business focused management -- as opposed to a product focused management -- was since they were already manufacturing product, they could delay the release of new product for a while. As any idiot with half a brain can figure out, when you stop or delay developing new products or improvements to existing products, your company can quickly fall behind the competition and become irrelevant.

As a testament to that, most of the companies I used to work for no longer exist. One was bought out by their primary competitor. Another still struggles to exist.

Hand-in-hand with this was the fact that the moment they put someone with an MBA in the role of CEO, the company was doomed. Because these people had no concept of what it took to develop and manufacture product, they would start making cuts indiscriminately in order to increase the profit margin -- not profit -- of the company. They would cut a few thousand workers from the payroll in order to "save" $3 million and then pay the CEO a bonus of $5 million for saving the $3 million by putting a few thousand people out of work. Immediately after, the CEO would pull on his golden parachute and jump the company, leaving it to fail.

Anyone in doubt of a business-focused CEO vs. a product-focused CEO need only look at the most perfect textbook example company: Apple Inc. After they ousted the product-focused Jobs from being CEO, they stuck business-focused men at the helm. Apple all but failed until product-focused Jobs retook command of the company. The first thing Jobs did when he returned was immediately put a stop to the financial dealings and focused the company on producing product again. The rest is history.

Business people do not value their creative staff. I remember listening to a vice president complaining about the salary that a particular engineer was being paid, saying the guy brought in no business, didn't sell anything, didn't spend any time on the phone talking to customers and just sat quietly in a corner all day doing nothing. The VP felt that any engineer being paid more than $60K per year was being overpaid. The engineer in question was the very man who designed and developed the technology behind the product the company sold. The very reason the company existed! The VP made life very unpleasant for the engineer and eventually the engineer gave up and quit. Over a short period of time, most of the people who worked with him left as well. The VP reported to the Board of Directors that he had managed to save nearly $1 million in 'administrative costs' (the salaries of the people no longer there) and successfully campaigned this into a six-figure salary increase. What this VP actually did, without realizing it, was effectively scuttle the company. After I left the company, I learned from others it was well over a year before the CEO and board members of the company discovered what had happened. By then it was too late. Lack of improvements and enhancements to their product made them irrelevant in the market. Their competitors, on the other hand, suddenly exhibited a surge in improvements and enhancements to their products, as well as the introduction of new products.

This was not an isolated case! One of the best examples of management not understanding or appreciating the true assets in the company was the case of Motorola vs. Intel. The Motorola PowerPC processor was the first mass produced CPU chip to break the 1 GHz barrier. The PPC was making inroads against Intel's Pentium line of processors and was rapidly moving ahead as the microprocessor of choice for new computers. Intel's line, on the other hand, had reached its theoretical maximum speed and was not moving ahead. Then, just as it seemed the PPC was about to truly gain momentum, things came to a screeching halt. Improvements and production suddenly bottlenecked. Yields on faster chips became negligible enough that Motorola's customers had to look elsewhere for CPU chips. Even Apple, their biggest customer, bailed on them. Intel, on the other hand, suddenly had new life breathed into their business and they were able to push their venerable line to new levels of performance. What happened was Intel poached talent from Motorola. They made offers that were so good, the engineers would have had to be idiots to turn them down. When Motorola realized what was happening, the counter offer they made to their remaining engineers was so paltry, that the engineers took it as an insult to their loyalty and they left as well. Motorola eventually sold off their semi-conductor business, claiming they wanted to focus on "more profitable product lines."

Last, twelve years ago Americans put in an administration that gutted the American education system and tried to put their personal theocratic beliefs ahead of thought and reason -- the very thing that the founding fathers of the United States tried to stop! They suddenly told scientists that their "opinions" were not welcome, and any university that didn't teach primitive mythology as absolute fact were cut from federal spending. The hostile attitude towards scientific method and study from the government and the hostile attitude towards creative product design and production from business management steered students away from production studies to other career fields.

Apple and Google are two excellent examples of management that gets it: production people are your most valuable assets, not the business people. And look at how well those companies are doing, even in this world economy. When you hear an administrator referring to employees as "worthless, unimportant, or unneeded assets," it is time to get your resume in order, because it won't be long before you'll need it.

You can only build a bridge so far without support before it collapses. You can only push an economy so far before it collapses without the support of good science, engineering, and manufacturing. America no longer has any of these. And considering what keeps showing up in the news in America, I wonder whether President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program should have been called "Leave No Child's Behind." The American people have certainly been screwed over by their government and management.

How is 1 cm any better? Different displays are a different number of cm in width, and fonts are different sizes in relation to cm, so the same amount will look different depending on the display and font size. em is a little better, but different displays are different numbers of characters in width as well.

You are correct!

1 cm = 1 cm

15 px can equal 3 mm or 1.5 cm depending on the resolution of the screen displaying the print. One screen might have 28 pixels per centimeter (72 ppi) while another can display 118 pixels per centimeter (300ppi).

If you define your paragraph indentation as a fixed 15 pixels, on one display that indentation might only be 5 mm in from the margin, while on another display it might only be 1 mm from the margin.

A better unit of measurement is the em, which is recommended for web design by the W3C for standardization of web page display. Em is now defined for digital use by being relative to the point size defined by the display in use. With the font-size set in points, this means that the em is defined in a relative manner to the size of the font being displayed, thence the display screen resolution, and is thereby scalable. The result is, if you set your indentation to a given number of em, then no matter on what display your text is showing or the font size selected, the paragraph indentation will always be the same number of characters in from the margin. Another advantage using the em is that if one decides to print the text on paper, it should appear on the paper as it did on a digital display without any modification. (That's the theory at least. We all know that famous quote by Yogi Berra: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.")

The E Ink Pearl imaging film, which both the Kindle and Nook use, has an imaging resolution of over 200 DPI (dots per inch). As the Kindle and Nook--depending on the model--use screen resolutions roughly around 150 PPI (pixels per inch), it means that those ebook readers are using 1.3 dots per pixel to render characters. If another ebook reader only uses a screen resolution of 100 PPI, then one em on that display will be different from one em on the Nook or Kindle, so the fonts would be sized differently on the different displays. But 1 em on any given device should still display and indentation of the same number of characters relative to the screen of that device, from one ebook to another. In the event of different screen resolutions for the same ebook, the user is going to have to make adjustments to the available font-size to make the text readable from one device to another.

Nowadays, screens with fixed character width are very rare, outside simple digital displays on equipment or devices such as a calculator. Even those are now using pixelated displays rather than each character having a fixed display unit. Dedicated ebook readers today do not use fixed-character displays.

I must admit, my initial post could have been better worked out. I was writing quickly being pressed for time. So, I figured using the fixed value of 1 cm vs. the pixel would be easier to follow by the readers than trying to explain the em. Good catch!

For the record, I set the CSS in the ebooks I fixed to 1.25em for the text indentation for paragraphs on my Nook Simple Touch.

Yeah, this has been a pain in the ass for me. Ballantine Press (Random House imprint for Sci-fi & Fantasy) has really screwed up the typography on their ebooks. It is clear that there is absolutely no QA going on in the publishing houses. I have yet to buy an ebook from Ballantine that does not require editing of the ebook to make it readable.

McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy collection is in terrible shape. Typographical errors are bad enough, but the books are loaded with spelling errors as well. It was so bad, I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the publisher. I forked over good money for a story I enjoyed, and found it almost unreadable due to the problems. One of the worst examples was the place name "Ruatha". I found over twenty times when it was misspelled as "Ruath"--in one case, it was even misspelled on a page where they had the correct spelling in the following paragraph!

Of a number of ebooks I've bought from Ballantine, I've had to break open the ebook files on all of them an edit the text and the CSS to correct the errors. It is clear to me that publishers have placed such a low priority on ebooks that they are willing to put out substandard product into the market without any quality control. In Piers Anthony's Xanth series, all it took was two tiny changes to the CSS to fix their typographical mistakes to make it a pleasure to read again.

Example: In the CSS in some of the ebooks, I noted that they had listed paragraph indentation defined as pixels. Well, 15 pixels on an ebook reader are not the same size as 15 pixels on a computer screen or a smart phone display. Pixels are a subjective value where one device can have 300 pixels in an inch another can have just 72. It is better to define text indentation as an objective value such as 1 cm or 1.5 em so it gets indented properly, no matter the device that is displaying the text. By defining the indentation in pixels, the paragraph indentation in some ebooks was so minimal that the paragraphs just ran together and couldn't be differentiated.

I find it ironic that the ebooks being sold by independent (e.g. self-published) authors to be flawless in their display while the ebooks from the big publishing houses with all their resources are all messed up.

Nasa has a list of plants that actually clean the air. A PDF of the original study is here, or you can go to a simplified list on Wikipedia. I think we are all aware of "sasquatches", individuals who while technically gifted are hygienically challenged. Having been 'squatched (trapped in an enclosed area by a sasquatch with precious little fresh air rejuvenation) far too many times, I also offer up a list of scented plants that can help. Humans tend to respond most favorably to rose-scented flowers (hence the popularity of roses). Sickly-sweet perfumes (such as lilies) can be unpleasant to some people. Miniature roses and rose-scented geraniums are probably the easiest to care for. Avoid poisonous plants (e.g. Angel trumpet) as at some point, a teenager (with little or no impulse control) is going to think it's funny (or for revenge) to slip a few bits of the plant into someone's drink or food without giving much thought to the potential outcome. If your high school has a gardening club, it would be wise to involve them. This could be a good lesson plan for students interested in biology and interior design.

Remove all fluorescent light tubes and replace them with LED banks. Preferably full spectrum or with a blend of colors. Make sure the lighting is always indirect and that the source points (the LEDs themselves) are not directly viewable. This makes for good, soft all-around lighting with little or no glare. Very easy on the eyes. Fluorescent lighting is very harsh on the eyes. I would build the banks based on five LEDs: cool white, warm white, red, green, and blue. I would also sprinkle in a couple of black-light purple LEDs. Turn this into a lesson and have the kids build such banks with an Arduino to control them. The kids could learn to program various light levels and colors to simulate various natural lighting situations. You could program the LED banks along the walls to actually change the color of the room. Also, full-spectrum lighting is good for the plants, just as it is calming for the humans in the room.

The room design is important as well. I would have the walls painted white with a slight bluish or cool grayish tint to it. Neutral grey colors are best for rooms where computer graphic design or image processing are taking place, to avoid the eyes being fooled about the color balance of an image. While greys are a cold and sterile color, the room can be warmed up by adjusting the color balance of the LED lights mentioned above. One wall should have a 16:9 rectangle painted in reflective paint to be used as a screen or have a retractable screen in front of an optional chalkboard for lessons. In a computer class, the teacher can then show code samples on the screen and demonstrations of changes to the code. Outgoing vents should be placed along the chalkboard or whiteboard, so dust from chalk and fumes and dust from the markers exits the room via the vents to protect the computers from dust. Good ventilation is also important due to the incidence of 'squatches mentioned above.

Chairs should have gel padding in the seats. There should be footrests beneath the desks. Being comfortable is vital when coding. Cheap, hard, plastic seats become uncomfortable very quickly and that becomes distracting while trying to work out some code.

For equipment, I would suggest Unix-based computers with a centralized administration console. Students should only have non-administrative accounts on their computers. Windows could be run via WINE or Parallels or Fusion, depending on the parent OS of the computers. Virtualized environments can easily be cleansed should a student introduce or create malicious software. Students should be encouraged to try and figure out how to escalate their permissions and use malicious software. If a student manages to do so, rather than punish them, have them write a report on how they did it and how they would protect a computer against it. Then make them prove their fix would work. Base their grade on it. The better one knows how to break a computer or network, the better one can understand how to fix or avoid the computer or network being pawned in the first place. In one company I worked, the production software engineers spent more time doing desktop service to fix executives computers (p4wn3d, ownzed and zombied by pr0n sites) than actually working on the software projects they were hired to work on. The company then fired some of the programmers for "lack of productivity". The rest of the programmers quit in protest. The company folded. The programmers went on to form their own business in corporate system recovery, specializing in intrusion avoidance. Keep the computers networked together in the classroom, but keep the classroom's subnet isolated from any network that is in the school. If kids want to bring in their own computers, allow that as a privilege they have to earn. (See below)

Maintain a strict code of conduct among the students. Kids will act like professionals if you demand it of them and teach them how to act in a respectful, professional manner. The emotional environment in any office is just as important as the physical environment. If the kids want to learn how to attack another computer, have at and let loose the hounds of war! Just hold them strictly not to damage the stored virtualized machine images and stay out of the administrative computers. Demand they respect the work of others. If they want to play games, then they have to write those games. Students who show excellent behavior and respect to others, give them privileges such as giving them escalated permissions on machines or administrative duties within the classroom. In my old high school, students actually worked as volunteer aides for the school administration managing the computer systems. In over thirty years, there was only one incident where a student abused those privileges--and he was caught and turned in by the other students. The worst punishment for him, admitted many years later, more than suspension and the legal problems he caused, was the disappointment and loss of respect from his peers. That stuck with him as a pivotal life lesson. Kids do rise to being given true responsibility and take that responsibility seriously.