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I have an early wooden Comptometer produced some time during 1887-1903. Still works. Amazing piece of engineering.

http://members.cruzio.com/~vagabond/Models.html

I know it's not much, but before broadband was available in my area we used two phone lines and two 56k modems bonded together using MultiPoint Protocol to get almost 112kbps. Sorry for the lack of a better link, but here's a FAQ from an ISP that supports this two modem connection.

FLASH used exactly that concept, and it lead to the discovery of the fact that there can be no quantum cloning. It was hypothesized that it was possible to tell whether an electron (or any other particle) was entangled or not, basically by seeing if a measurable property changed when another entangled property was measured. It relied on being able to make a perfect copy of the quantum state and measuring it repeatedly to get exact measurements in violation of the uncertainty principle. If that could be done, then measuring an entangled particle would transmit measurable information to the other entangled particle(s) immediately. It turns out that perfect (100% accurate) quantum cloning is not possible, so no matter which particle gets measured first there's no way to tell on the other end. It's interesting that the actual limit on the probability of success in quantum cloning (which has been measured physically and found to match the predicted value well) is exactly the limit necessary to prevent causal inconsistencies or faster than light information transfer.

I have a d-link with wireless and wired functionality and I just read this tutorial http://www.cruzio.com/support/docs/router_dlink524 .html#general about disabling the wireless part for d-links. You basically click disable on "wireless radio" and in addition to that I disabled SSID broadcast. I'd like to confirm this will actually stop these potentially problematic microwave "emissions" or whatever they are? I'm not being paranoid, I just don't use it and thought it'd be good to disable it anyway.

With the pace at which technology is growing and (hopefuly beyond moore's law soon) the fear of buying a new computer is extremely high for middle income computer nerds. There is always something better up ahead. Just a few months ago I bought an X800 graphics card, supposedly the world's fastest graphics processor chip (few months ago), by now its almost going close to crap. With nanotechnology and a 'trillion transisters' on a single chip, we should not only anticipate a great leap in raw processor power and speeds, but also an overwhelming increase is in the rate of growth itself.

I can see a time not very far away when a computer buyer would say to another buyer 'so you still wanna buy the latest 1 Terahertz Pentium 7 system released today?.'.. 'Nah, dude, I think i'm going to wait a 'few hours' for the 3 Terahertz system to come out'.. :P

Didn't Jack Black do this (or pretend to) in School of Rock?

Also , never forget the Animaniacs' Warner Bros (and sister!) doing the countries of the world, among others (http://www2.cruzio.com/~keeper/00.html).

Hmm... Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and even George W. Bush fit that profile to a T. I wonder if Jack Thompson is a Republican.

See also http://members.cruzio.com/~zdino/writings/mentalHe althOfGWBush.htm

I bought MicroPort Unix in 1988 for $1,000. It was a Sys V variant that ran on the PC. This was in the days before X Windows.

This gives students a chance to better understand how much creativity it takes to make what basically sounds like a simple rock song.

Absolutely. Not just students, even, but anybody who's interested in peeking behind the curtain to see a small part of what goes into making, as you say, what sounds like a simple rock song. (Though in a sense, it is simple - most of the tracks are synth keyboards, guitars, or percussion - in other words, the building blocks of rock.)

More important, it might even win him some new fans - folks who used to be somewhat jaded about listening to the music of a rocker who primarily seems to record for video games. I know I'll be checking into NIN a lot more than I would have considered had my only exposure to it been Quake and the T-shirt worn by a certain youthful slacker culture.

As for the song itself, the only change I can consider making is replacing Trent's vocals with the voice track from the Animaniac's song I'm Cute. (If you've heard the song, turn off the vocal track and sing along with the lyrics on the other end of that link - you'd be amazed how well they fit the rhythm, for the most part.)

Anybody know where I can find a 16-track Animaniacs remix?

Pauper

This posting reminded me of an interaction that I had with a co-worker. He wasn't a developer in the hard core sense. He was the head of the team that did the web design. He could do flash. I don't know what that entails since I was director over the development team. I don't have any experience with flash.

He wanted to set up a server for his fiance's school. They could not afford Windows and he knew that Linux was cool so he chose Redhat. I believe it was around version 7 at the time.

He would tell me his stories of frustration about setting up RedHat. Every time he wanted to change a configuration option, he would reinstall the OS.

Before the Windows pandemic, I did a lot of System V work. I switched over to Windows because I could make more money but I still would run Unix at home for personal reasons. I ran Microport Unix for a while. I believe my first exposure to Linux was a distro from Walnut Creek called yggdrasil. Now I have old versions of Redhat on both a laptop and a desktop and I play around with these bootable CDs like dynebolic and knoppix.

You can see why I didn't have any problems with Linux. It would never have occurred to me to keep reinstalling Linux whenever I wanted to make a configuration change but that was what came naturally to the co-worker.

I don't know why he made that choice and I felt a little embarrassed to ask. I guess that was the first UI he saw concerning configuration and it was easy and he didn't try to look around for any other way to make his configuration changes.

I did give him some tips and I believe that he did successfully deploy Linux for the school in the end.

While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message.

If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.

If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.

It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula at parties around the town.

Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.

You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.

Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.

It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.

I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".

My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.

Even if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux distributions I use.

SCO's license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to con

While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message.

If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.

If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.

It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula at parties around the town.

Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.

You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.

Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.

It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.

I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".

My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.

Even if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux distributions I use.

SCO's license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to con

For songs comparable to Tom Lehrer, I'd suggest the Animaniacs soundtracks. Most specifically, Yakko's Universe, Planets, Wakko's America, and Presidents. Using familiar tunes to teach, it's great. Especially the ending of Planets. (Kind of need to hear it, but it's classic all the same.)

check out Free/Freak Radio Santa Cruz truly for the people, by the people

I live in Owl's Head, Maine, which is where Midcoast Internet Solutions was founded - Midcoast was featured on Slashdot recently for its forward-thinking work on installing wireless in Midcoast Maine.

I was talking about this with my neighbor, a midcoast dialup subscriber, and he told me that the founder of Midcoast did it while he was still in high school.

(I'm looking into getting wireless finally; however there is a hill between me and the transitter so I'm not sure yet I can get the signal).

When you cross the border into Maine you will see a big blue sign that says "Welcome to Maine, the way life should be." And I think it's true.

It's very peaceful here, the people are nice, there seems to be a lot of interest in the arts and music.

I was able to buy my first house here after renting for 15 years in Santa Cruz, California. I'm paying substantially less in mortgage payments to own a 4 bedroom house with a 2 car garage on a bunch of land than I did to rent a cramped 2-bedroom half of a duplex in Santa Cruz.

Of course there is the winter to contend with. And I never imagined the summer would be as hot as it was. The climate is much more even in Santa Cruz. But I found last winter to be tolerable and incredibly beautiful.

I recall reading on my power bill recently that electricity rates had dropped slightly. Take that, California!

I still view news on the net as a growing with room for all kinds.

for all those interested, I've made a page with a pic of the missing chip in question. http://members.cruzio.com/~slazar/

here is a pic indicating exactly where the chip used to be. I desoldered it. http://members.cruzio.com/~slazar/

Microsoft = Communism!

That's right, the world's largest software company is little more than a Maoist personality cult bent on world domination! Just look at the facts:

• Microsoft's .NET architecture is moving power away from independent PCs and towards centralized servers. .NET is collectivization for the 21st century!
• Microsoft software controls 95% of the world's personal computers. Windows is the software equivalent of a single-party political system!
• Microsoft ruthlessly squashes all opposition by giving away for free services you would otherwise have to pay for - a classic Communist tactic!
• Chairman Bill wears little round glasses! See any resemblance?
• Chairman Bill donates millions to charity. That's the kind of 'redistribution of wealth' our great country was founded to oppose!

Scientific American article
From the article: ""I was kind of interested in pushing the system to see how far you could go with allowable claims," explains Schlafly, a member of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization that opposes software patents. Although Schlafly can now sue anybody for using his numbers, he is not worried about people infringing on his rights. "When you get to numbers that are so big that nobody has used them before, well, there are lots of them up there," he says."

Patent number 5,373,560

She wasn't all that impressed, it was just a brief note to compliment my page, and I get such notes all the time.

What mattered was that we began corresponding, and after a month or so I asked for her phone number, and we began talking on the phone occassionally. I really impressed her by calling her in Nova Scotia while I was visiting a friend in Rome.

She lived in Truro, Nova Scotia, I in Santa Cruz, California. I soon discovered the need for cheap long distance - before I got my rate lowered I received a $2500 bill for just one month, and even after getting AT&T one rate international my bills were running $1100 per month.

She didn't own her own computer so voice over IP wasn't an option, and I tried to make it one by sending her my old 486 and Speak Freely. While she was able to negotiate Speak Freely's complex UI the 486 wasn't up to the task of the signal processing.

I also made three visits to her (the first on January 18, 1998, in wintry Canada from sunny California, bringing a rose with me all the way on the plane), and she made two to me.

It was when I offerred to buy her a brand new Pentium-II machine to run Speak Freely on that she decided to finally come out to Santa Cruz and live with me.

She soon found work doing biotech and was able to stay for a year on a TN-1 visa, an option also available to americans and mexicans in each other's countries who hold bachelor's degrees and work in various professional fields (tip - computer programming qualifies).

We were married July 22, 2000 in Pippy Park, St. John's Newfoundland just outside the Fluvarium where we held our reception. It was a beautiful day - outdoor weddings are not common in Newfoundland because of the northern climate, and in fact we rented a big tent.

We moved back to the U.S. a few weeks ago and now live in Owl's Head Maine in a house we could have never hoped to have afforded in Santa Cruz.

Mike

In Santa Cruz, California I was paying $1275 a month to rent a two bedroom half of a duplex. In St. John's, I rented a three bedroom two-story house for $500, and in Maine I'll be owning a four-bedroom home for a house payment of $799 - with an oversized two-car garage.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The whole reason I wanted to buy those two Ultra160 hard drives was because I wanted to use them in my work. One for use in a high-end Linux server, and one for use in a Mac 8500.

I couldn't find such drives in St. John's Newfoundland, or a SCSI Ultra160 controller (to be fair, I did get my 39160 controller from Insight, although it still took several weeks).

I didn't want to run an e-commerce site. I just wanted to have fast machines for use in my office. The Linux server was going to serve source code via Samba to a Mac and a Windows machine, to enable simultaneous cross-platform development.

To make matters worse, I wanted to use the Ultra160 drive on a SCSI-2 50 pin single-ended bus. You can do this - see http://www.scsifaq.org - but you need a 68 conductor to 50 conductor adapter which terminates the high byte in the manner specified for Ultra160.

Just try finding one of those in Canada! I ordered it from California from one of the cable vendors listed in the SCSI faq.

With all the little components I was wanting, as well as technical books (Chapters in St. John's is decent, but not as good as a Silicon Valley bookstore), I was frequently being awakened from bed for weeks by the Purolator man delivering some widget or other for weeks after I moved to St. John's.

With Insight's interminable delay in getting my drives to me, and being able to locate a good dual-Xeon motherboard with the extra widgets for clustering ability (out-of-band control), I never did build my server.

And then when my Compaq 1800T laptop had power connector problems and wouldn't charge, Compaq wouldn't send the new power adapter to Canada, even though they have a Canadian subsidiary; it's a US only model that I bought in the US. I had to have Compaq express the new power adapter to my dad in Washington State, and he expressed it to me in Newfoundland, at a cost of $59 - coincidentally, the price of buying a brand-new power adapter.

It turns out that the new power adapter does not completely solve my charging problem, so I'm getting ready to contact Compaq about sending the CPU in for warranty repair. I'm figuring they'll tell me I have to ship it to my dad and then they'll have FedEx pick it up at his house. Maybe when I'm home for thanksgiving...

Now, these are annoyances for me, but multiply them across the whole nation of Canada and I think you have a serious impact on the whole Canadian economy. I'd never have stood for bullshit like this when I was living in Santa Cruz - there are too many computer dealers in the area and in nearby Silicon Valley for anyone to stay in business with such poor performance.

Yes, this is annoying for me but what if you're trying to set up a Canadian e-commerce site? Where do you get your components? Can't get them at the screwdriver shop around the corner like I could in Santa Cruz. SCSI? What's that? Don't even ask about Ultra160 SCSI. It's not just a matter of having to pay the brokerage and shipping fees - it's the time to wait for things to ship and to clear customs, in such a competitive world as the Internet economy, it is simply absurd for anyone to attempt to make a real computer business in Canada.

I'm sad to say it, as I love living here in Canada (for reasons unrelated to the computer biz here), but being unable to deal with business matters effectively such as the lack of components and the lack of access to technical information like well-stocked technical bookstores where I can actually go in and flip through the pages to evaluate a book, is a significant factor in choosing to move back to the U.S.

There are other reasons, but that's one of them.

Funny, I'd thought that being away from Silicon Valley might be a problem in terms of not being able to find clients for my consulting business, but it's not, I still get lots of work from the Bay Area and elsewhere around the world. It's the grunge work like putting together a new machine in a hurry when my main development machine (that laptop) is down that I'm not able to do effectively here.

I used Eudora. Live Picture is just about done with its bankrupcy proceedings.

I'm afraid I didn't save the letter (which I think was one of the best things I ever wrote), but I remember saying that Live Picture was special because it provided quality technical employment in Santa Cruz County, but in Silicon Valley it would be just another software company in a sea of faceless companies stretching from horizon to horizon.

I copied the resignation widely throughout the company (including the president) three hours after the president announced plans for the move. Later that evening I began collecting URLs to list in the first version of the above-linked web page and a few days later quietly passed out the URLs to my fellow employees.

The president, (ahem) "resigned" after losing tens of millions of dollars.

Usually my very best emails are flames...

A number of people are actively trying to organize such things, but the results so far haven't been promising and the consensus on the reason way is that programmers are just a bunch of pussies too concerned with bringing home the immediate bacon rather than lift a finger to look after their future.

Yeah, that's right - you. Pussies. You may have the balls to post anonymously on Slashdot, but when was the last time you not only voted, but gave money to a political campaign whose position you supported, and did volunteer work for it.

Last time for me was '92, I'm afraid, when the president of Working Software and I organized the Jerry Brown for President campaign in Santa Cruz, California in the company offices.

I donated the maximum Jerry would accept during that campaign - $100.

I haven't done it a whole lot, and I have to admit that sometimes the approaches I get frighten me or I am too busy with my own thing to deal with them. But whenever I have done so it has been extremely rewarding.

I also know from my own experiences with mental illness that one of the most miserable things about it is the reaction that strangers on the street have to you. Being disturbed makes you look and act different sometimes, and often people will avoid your glance, cross the street upon your approach, or lock their car doors when they see you standing at the street corner. You'd better believe that the affected person notices that even if they don't visibly react to it.

The first time I did this a man in Pasadena asked me for money for food. I bought him lunch, spent an hour with him and ended up giving him ten dollars. He was a very nice man and said he was a hardworking construction laborer but couldn't get work.

The second time I met a couple homeless people, a vietnam vet and a teenage girl on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz California. The girl was coming down from an acid trip and having a very bad time. We talked for quite a long time - the vet recounted the horrors he still sufferred from having killed a soldier with a bayonet in Laos. I bought the girl a slice of thick-crust pizza at Pizza My Heart. It comforted her greatly.

On another occassion I had noticed a schizophrenic woman around town, who hung out downtown a lot but never seemed to talk to anyone. I just walked up to her, asked her name, and we got to talking.

Allison was a very nice woman and interesting to talk to - but was having such a hard time with her hallucinations that she had to keep brushing them out of her face with her hands so she could see me. I bought her a coffee at the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company. We just sat and talked. I imagine she was on government assistance and was neither homeless nor hungry, but probably (like I back in the dark days) welcomed someone to talk to who didn't react with revulsion.

That was years ago, and better medicines for treating schizoid symptoms have been developed (clozaphine, and the risperdal I take). I ran into Allison again not too long ago and she seemed like a pretty ordinary woman, and spoke of her husband and children. She didn't remember me from before.

My wife tells me about how a lot of people say panhandlers are just trying to rip you off, and I imagine some of them are - there are dishonest programmers too, aren't there, but we still associate with each other? She's very generous in giving money to those who ask for it because she knows that by doing so her conscience is clear. Maybe a few people will come by the money dishonesty, but far more people will be helped a little bit out of their misery.

Even if you feel you can't or won't give spare change to someone who asks, stop and chat with them. They may not admit to it but it's far more likely that they are hungering for genuine human contact more than food or money. I know I was.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Roger Schlafly patented a large nearly 150 digit prime number. Check out: http://bbs.cruzio.com/~schlafly/sciam.htm

Should the last-minute pop bailout of Iridium fail to gather the required momentum, there's another project you might want to save your tax-deductable nickles & Sacajawaeae for: "wolf pack" U-boats dropped intact into the Baltic at the end of WWII. It'll cost about $200K U.S. to raise one, and another $6K U.S. (estimated) to win the right to do so at a government auction.

I have to agree about that minimum salary when you just get out of school. The lowest offer I had was 42K in San Diego, CA. for a software programmer position. I went with a 48K in San Jose, CA. doing SAP/UNIX Sys Admin. After 1.5 years I chose to leave, with a salary of 54K (raises, promotion, etc) and with the experience I had in SAP, Oracle, and UNIX, I took a position with one of the big 4 (big 5 or 6 at the time) consulting companies, at 64K. Now I'm looking to move on for specific reasons, and expect to increase to 70K+. Hopefully the current prospects will have the environment and stability that I can stay for a few years. I'm tired of changing so often.

I've noticed the average salary for sys admins to be a bit higher than programmers (5K or so).

If you have mixed skills (bio, chemistry, etc) and a strong computer education, you can start at a LOT higher salary... especially in the Silicon Valley, where bio research and computers are so well-to-do.

As most people have said... the company will try to screw you (I know from experience). They can afford more than they want to give, and that's something to remember when you negotiate offers for new jobs. If a company you're with is screwing you, keep in mind that there are other companies out there who are nicer (but will still try to screw you!). And that knowledge alone could give you more power within your current position.

On a related note... I wanted to put together a page with people's stories of interviews, salary negotiations and problems, and just post it. I'd like to have information that others can learn from and that can help people in our industry. So if you're so inclined, check out this page
It doesn't have any ads on it... I'm gaining nothing... just thought it would be a nice thing to have had... and others may feel the same.

I cared enough about this issue BEFORE Columbine that I wrote a book about how to create emotionally supportive listening relationships and support groups. It is called Changing the World One Relationship at a Time and I'm trying to find ways to bring it to the attention of those people who could use it.

Yes, I would like to sell copies, but I never would have written a book on this topic if I didn't think the information was important. I have seen the techniques in my book used to create powerful alliances that have changed people's lives including my own. You see, I was one of those ostracized kids and relate very strongly to the outpouring of pain being expressed on this issue. Now I am 40. Through my work as a peer counseling practitioner and teacher I have healed most of the wounds from my childhood and now make my living teaching other people how to support each other well. (I currently work for the Alzheimers Association.)

You can read excerpts from my book at my website.

If you can think of individuals or organizations that could benefit from this book, let me know. I believe my publisher might be willing to provide copies at a substantial discount if they were bought in bulk.