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I have not used Livescribe recommended by another poster. But it seems to me you will not be able to record your audio unless you actually walk to the blackboard with your tablet. Of course if you are always in tablet mic range then it might be okay.

Another thing is quality. You can get a pin mic (see audio technica brand or there are others) and voice recorder (they all have sd cards and usb these days, the most popular one for business will record 1000 hours or less at MP3 quality, best I am told is Olympus but there are other brands and some are pretty small).

This might give you better quality and you can pin the mic to your lapel or shirt front while slipping the recorder in your pocket. But if you can indeed just use tablet for all drawings and always be near it you might have good enough quality plus be able to synchronize. Of course this assumes you have a way for the student to play it back. I think personally it would probably be much better quality if you do this:

Create written course notes in advance with nicely written equations etc. on your tablet
Draw on blackboard with tablet and record that, give this and the advance notes to the students on your course website.
Use voice recorder to get high quality sound and dump the sd card to your website. Verbally say which page of notes, or blackboard drawing, you are talking about.
Optionally have a video camera synched to voice recorder, depends on how animated you are and how important are the gestures at the blackboard. Maybe not so important.
Then organize the files on your site, with a wiki or blog and maybe a rss feed to let people know when it is updated. Maybe scribd would be useful too.
I saw some info at
http://www.slideshare.net/hebertm3308/interactive-classrooms-presentation
and http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listweb20s.html

Did you know that the "q" in qmail stands for "queer"??? That's SO cool!!!

Top results for one-letter google searches as of Sat May 17
a : Apple
b : B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the ...
c : CNET.com
d : D-Link Systems, Inc.
e : Welcome to E! Online
f : Welcome to F-Secure, Securing the Mobile Enterprise
g : G*Loomis
h : H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online
i : Yahoo!
j : J-???
k : KDE Homepage - Conquer your Desktop!
l : LEXPRESS.fr : l'info au quotidien. L'actualité économique, ...
m : 3M Worldwide
n : SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer : Online Learning : ...
o : www.oreilly.com -- Welcome to O'Reilly & Associates -- computer ...
p : Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
q : Q4music.com - The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online
s : GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software ...
t : AT&T
u : The whatUseek Network
v : Welcome to Bobby WorldWide
w : Welcome to the White House
x : Netscape.com
y : Yahoo!
z : HealthAtoZ - Your Family Health Site

• A Note to Current SBC Pacific Bell DSL Internet Access Service Customers:

  Keep an eye on your inbox and mailbox this winter for information about your SBC Yahoo! DSL upgrade software.

  Upgrading is easy and improves your service without interfering with four important aspects of your membership. Your email address, your price, your billing method, and the speed of your DSL Internet connection all stay the same as they are now while you get all the great benefits of SBC Yahoo! DSL.

Out West it's called Privacy Manager, but in the Northeast it's called Call Intercept. Number of telespam I've gotten per day has gone from 2-3 to 0. Either the autodialers can't handle the automated prompt to record their name, or the telemarketers know they have no sale and just hang up instead of recording their name.

For the past 15 months, I've tried virtually every option available and I can't get it. The .com bust didn't help some struggling providers, but the real problem is the bastards that control the last mile. Because they have monopolies on the copper coming into my house, I am left with the poor prospect of allowing SpeakEasy.net to service themselves monthly on my posterior, while being grateful that they're only charging $89.99 for an 128k line.

I'd like to have other options, but reality has a nasty way of intruding on my dreams. Here's a quick rundown for those who are interested:

Cable Modem: Real Soon Now[TM], @Home says so. And that's been their story for the last 15 months.

Sprint Wireless: I live in a local valley that line-of-sight technologies can't penetrate. Of course, Sprint isn't even offering this now...

Wireless (Ricochet): Had a fat 128k pipe, but Chapter 13 took down the connection. Aerie (who bought Ricochet) claims to be offering service again. If only they would have done something 2 months sooner.

Satellite: Check out Huge Aircrash's, er I mean Hughes Electronics' spiffy DiRECWAY technology. What's that? Only available for Windows 98, 2k, and ME? Well Windows ME harder! I refuse to buy another computer to access the 'Net.

Fiber: I can pay to have Fiberhood run fibre to the rental I live in...or not.

DSL: Some local monopoly claims that they'll be upgrading their equipment in my area, which will shorten the 23,400 feet distance between my home and highspeed heaven Real Soon Now[TM]. And it's been their story for 15 months, too.

The real problem is that no one can afford to compete with the incumbent telcos. Even if someone could come up with a high-speed wireless solution (and 128k does not qualify) for my area, they'd be out of business within 2-3 years of inception and within 6-9 months of deployment. Why? Guess where the monopolies would spend their time upgrading their services--areas where customers have no choices, or areas where their monopoly is threatened?

The demand is threre. Content is not really holding up broadband. Broadband is being held up by the ILECs--at virtual gunpoint.

So I thought I should do the right thing and let the owner of the offending source domain/IP know. Sent an email with details of the source IP date/time etc. The common ones were coming off big name companies.

Response? I got one return email asking for my logs.

Just out of interest, I did the same thing with some spam recently - notifying the webmaster/abuse and the owner of the source IP from whois. I sent the relevant details, date/time content of the message.

Very similar result. One reply. Telling me to send the same info to another abuse address at a different domain that is run by the same company.

What frustrates the hell out of me is that they expect me to do their goddam job for them. I gave them THEIR source IP/host/mailing details and dates/times! I'm trying to do the right thing, but do they really expect me to get the name and phone number of the offender?

Obviously, they're not interested. In their eyes, it's not the black hats, or spammers, but *I* am the problem.

Frankly, after going out of my way to help these clowns, makes me want to join the script kiddies...

Does anyone know a major site that actually _uses_ spews? I couldn't find one.

I couldn't find any statements (definitive or otherwise) from any big players saying that they are using SPEWS. However, by looking at the reports in news.admin.net-abuse.email and the bounce messages that I asked to be forwarded to me I think the two largest users of SPEWS are:

Pacific Bell - a large telecom on the US west coast.

Outblaze - a mailbox outsource company which handles mail for such sites as Mail.Com (a free mailbox provider).

I'm looking to move and went to qualify my new address's phone number on pacbell.net's website. To my surprise I also saw sdsl offerings there. See here for more info.

sulli

PacBell is currently installing an external Ethernet DSL router under their 1 year contract special. At least I assume it's an external based on the equipment specification/system requirements that they give.

I've been using PacBell's online billing service for a few months. Each month they send an email notifying you that a new bill is ready to be viewed. They don't charge your account until you verify and approve the bill. So far, I've been very pleased with the service.

http://www.pacbell.com/Billing _Accounts/OnLineBilling/

I think that it would be much harder getting a job that allows you to work from home than it would be to take your job with you when you move. I recently got married, and moved to a different state a few hundred miles from my company in August of 99, and I took my job with me. So far, things seem to be going well.
I have been doing this via a 56k modem because cablemodem/DSL isn't available at my home yet. A faster connection would be very desirable when I have to do things that require me to remote control PC's at the office via pcAnywhere, or VNC. But as a computer programmer, there are few things that I actually need to be on-site to do, and although I work with huge data files, I generally either have them burned to CD and mailed, or burn them to CD while I am on site... To keep in easy contact, we set up ICQ throughout the computer department. We can tell when each other are at the keyboard, can pop into a chat session, etc. But this will probibly change to voice once I get a faster net connection. Also, I go back to the main office about once a month... not because I necessarily need to, but because the people that I work with are really cool.
The thing to watch out for, however, is that telecommuting is not for everyone. I had a co-worker that did the same thing as me... about a month before me. He ended up leaving the company mainly because working from home with little human interaction drove him nuts. And people very often bring up the "out of sight, out of mind" I just don't see it.
The best site I have found for people considering telecommuting is:
Gil Gordon's Telecommute pages
OR
Pac Bell's work at home pages.
One last comment: I can't blame you for not wanting to live in Silicon Valley, but wanting to work there. Get the high-tech/high-pay job, but neither the rat race, nor the cost of living.

I was under the impression that Flashcom was the CLEC here. According to your post, and from what I can understand, Flashcom is probably reselling Covad's services. Covad is the CLEC, not Flashcom.

Correct (although in my case, they're using the ILEC, Pac Bell, rather than any CLEC).

As far as I know, they're not just reselling Covad's services, though; I don't think Covad is doing the routing for them, I have the impression Covad just moves data from some ILEC's CO to Flashcom's routers.

As far as Pacbell's ATM net, they are probably referring to their own DSL service offering, which does not have anything to do with Covad, or Flashcom.

They're referring, as far as I know, to the pipe they provide between a subscriber and their ATM net, and to the ATM services they're providing to ISPs including but not limited to Pacific Bell Internet. See, for example, this diagram on Pac Bell's site, which shows the line to the CO, the DSLAM in the CO, and the ATM network - they run a PVC over that network to the ISP, or to a corporate LAN if the DSL circuit is being used for telecommuting to work rather than connecting to an ISP.

For CLECs, the picture is probably the same, except that the DSLAM belongs to the CLEC and is in the cage they rent from the ILEC, and, presumably, so does the ATM network - this page on Rhythms' Web site seems to imply that they have their own ATM network, independent of any ILEC's network.

They probably use a pots splitter

Yes, there's a splitter at my demarcation point, which sends stuff up to 4KHz, presumably, along one wire, into which my Plain Old Telephones plug, and stuff above 4KHz along another wire, into which my DSL box plugs. There's also a device at the CO that does the same; that's presumably the "Mux" in the aforementioned diagram on Pac Bell's Web site.

Which DSLAM (Pacbell's or Covad's or Rhythms' or ours hopefully some day) depends on who sends you your bill, and or who send them their bill.

Pac Bell puts a USD 39.95 item on my phone bill for DSL, so it's presumably their DSLAM. (I presume Flashcom will send me a USD 10.00 bill one of these days; they may offer "first month free", but it's been more than a month - I should call them to find out what the story is, as I don't want to have my Internet service cut off for non-payment of a bill that I never got in the first place....)

Flashcom is a CLEC,

Hmm. So where exactly does Covad, say - who provide service to Flashcom, as per this item on Flashcom's site, which says

The pace at which ISPs and data CLECs are striking partnerships shows just how critical each camp is to the other's long-term prospects. The big draw for ISPs, of course, is that they get access to high-speed lines without incurring the expense of creating their own DSL networks.

"The biggest reason we don't do it ourselves is that it takes a lot of time," says Brad Sachs, president of Flashcom (www.flashcom.com), a national ISP that sells nothing but DSL services. "It's easy enough to get CLEC status. But then you have to go out and procure rights to enter the incumbent facilities. The central offices are supposed to be open, but in reality it takes a very good legal staff and a lot of patience to get access."

...

Though the CLECs say they can keep up, there are already signs of trouble. "We're all being crushed by demand," Sachs says, noting that Flashcom partners Covad and NorthPoint currently are trying to catch up on a backlog of circuit installations that numbers in the thousands. "I've got 3,000 people waiting for service today."

fit into this picture?

The impression I had was that my phone signal was split into voice and DSL portions at the CO, with the DSL portion going into Pac Bell's ATM network, running over that network to Flashcom, as per the comment

To deliver megabit speed over standard phone lines, your corporate LAN or Internet service provider will need to be connected to the Pacific Bell ATM network.

at the end of this Pac Bell page. Flashcom then routes my packets to sites elsewhere on the Internet and routes packets from those sites to me.

Pacbell does do DSL (unless they are still testing) service also, but maybe not in your area.

Pac Bell has provided Internet service (which I view as "routing packets to and from sites on the Internet, and possibly providing other services such as DNS lookup, mail service, netnews service, and the like"), and some amount of support for DSL for other ISPs, for several months now. They also , as far as I know, allow CLECs such as Covad into their COs as well.

Okay, so maybe they're not set up to do the handholding that they do for windows lusers, but do they need to?

They could, like PacBell does, say "we can't help you set up linux, but we don't care if you use it."

Doesn't take any effort on their part. Doesn't take any changes on their part.

The guy responded by saying that yes, he had been reading about BellSouth DSL and Linux on slashdot earlier.

Basically, PacBell techs generally don't know about Linux (they bring a windows laptop to make sure the line is up) but they have no problem with people using Linux with their DSL. They don't even have a problem with people hanging a network off their connection (as I have done.)

And lastly, my guy actually knew something about Linux (had me do an IFCONFIG) and didn't talk to me as if I used my CD tray as a cupholder.

I definitely recommend PacBell DSL.

In a moment of weakness, I decided to get DSL, since I was sick of the 150+ pings I was getting in QuakeWorld.

I chose to remain with my ISP, Best Internet, which was recently acquired by Verio. The Common Wisdom is that Best, under Verio's ownership, will start to blow chunks, but since Matt Dillon (not the actor) designed and built the infrastructure, I figure it will take about a year for that to happen. I also wasn't yet ready to change my Web and email address again.

Verio's Website on DSL is badly designed and ridiculously unhelpful. You have to have JavaScript turned on in order to use it (dumbasses). Once you clear that hurdle, it will tell you everything except who the DSL provider is and how much it will cost, which makes shopping inconvenient.

Anyway, I called up, got a quote, had an argument with my checkbook, and decided to go for it. I signed a one year contract with them. In that time, I plan to change my email and Web address one last time, and transition to my own domain, hosting my Web and email locally. (O'Reilly security books, here I come...)

Fax 'n Figgers

Phone company: Pacific Bell
DSL provider: Northpoint
ISP: Best Internet
Distance to CO: ~2000 feet
Maximum possible data rate: 1.5Mbits (heh heh)
Selected DSL plan: 416K SDSL, "Workgroup" plan, 16 IP addresses (14 usable)
Highest observed download rate: 47K bytes/sec.
Lowest observed QuakeWorld ping: 30ms
DSL equipment: Netopia SDSL router
Monthly cost: More than I care to admit (> $200/month)
Usage restrictions: None. I can run a server if I wish.

The DSL signup contract I got from Best/Verio had a little clause in it saying effectively, "You agree not to reverse-engineer any of the software or hardware we provide." I crossed it out and initialed it. Didn't hear a peep out of them about it. (Heh heh)

It took about four weeks from the phone call until the Northpoint techs showed up and did the inside wiring. Alas, they didn't bring the Netopia router with them; that got sent to me the next day via overnight shipping.

I plugged in the router, turned it on, got a Green Light, and... Nothing. I could talk to the router, but I couldn't ping anything beyond that. I called up Best, and whined, "It doesn't work." They called Northpoint, who evidently threw some magic switches, and suddenly the Internet opened up before me. Yay!

I've successfully configured DSL for Windoze-98, Linux (Slackware, kernel 2.0.35), and BeOS R4. All three are happy as clams.

QuakeWorld pings have been as low as 30ms; Quake2 pings a bit higher. I don't have a 3D card (yet), so I can't report on Quake 3 Arena.

One weird thing I had to get used to was the "always on" nature of DSL. I'm paranoid about accidentally leaving the phone line connected (I only have one phone line), so when I'm "done" using the net, my instinct is to hang up the modem. Well, I don't have to do that now, and it feels weird.

Apart from the waiting to receive it and getting it to work, it has been overall a successful and pleasant experience.

Schwab

I was getting married, and figured that the higher cost would be offset by eliminating my and my girlfri^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwife's dial-up accounts. (Okay, so that was just an excuse.8^)

Well, I did have a bit of a rough start -- they didn't show up for the first install appointment and when I called, the gal on the phone made another appointment, but didn't tell anyone about it. But the third time was a charm. A guy from Southern California (up here specifically for DSL installs) showed up, knew what he was doing, hooked things up, and voila.

I've got a splitter on the wall in the garage (along with all the other phone line stuff) which runs upstairs to my office/mess where it plugs into an Alcatel modem. The DSL modem is connected to a Kingston PCMCIA ethernet card in an old laptop with a broken screen. This runs Linux and serves as the gateway to my new home network via a Linksys PCMCIA ethernet card.

The PacBell guy was able to get a connection right away and start downloading stuff; it took me a little longer as this was my first time using Linux seriously. (Don't stick your toe in, just jump on in! 8^) But, I did figure it out, and now have another Linux box, my DOS/Win3.11 laptop, a Win3.11 box by the bed, a Mac, and a Win95 box hooked up, with my wife's big mac and my dad's pc coming on-line soon.

It works great -- I've had only two problems: one, PacBell was having a problem and was up again in an hour (like any ISP might have) and once the modem had to be reset. So, yes, I'm quite happy. PacBell provides the DSL Modem, the NIC for whatever type of computer you have (PC or Mac, ISA, PCI, NuBus, or PCMCIA) and sets it all up for you. The guy that did it for me handled everything except setting the card up under Linux -- he was a windows guy (nice nonetheless). I already had wiring in place, but he would have run it if I didn't from the garage to the attic.

The best part is the cost. The setup (includes the modem and NIC) is $199, but the monthly fee for 384K download/128K upload is $50 ($39/mo for the DSL and $10 for the ISP stuff) and includes a static IP. However, that's a minimum guaranteed download speed -- I've regularly gotten over 1.5mbps download speeds.

So, I have to say I am most happy with my PacBell DSL service and can recommend it highly, if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was getting married, and figured that the higher cost would be offset by eliminating my and my girlfri^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwife's dial-up accounts. (Okay, so that was just an excuse.8^)

Well, I did have a bit of a rough start -- they didn't show up for the first install appointment and when I called, the gal on the phone made another appointment, but didn't tell anyone about it. But the third time was a charm. A guy from Southern California (up here specifically for DSL installs) showed up, knew what he was doing, hooked things up, and voila.

I've got a splitter on the wall in the garage (along with all the other phone line stuff) which runs upstairs to my office/mess where it plugs into an Alcatel modem. The DSL modem is connected to a Kingston PCMCIA ethernet card in an old laptop with a broken screen. This runs Linux and serves as the gateway to my new home network via a Linksys PCMCIA ethernet card.

The PacBell guy was able to get a connection right away and start downloading stuff; it took me a little longer as this was my first time using Linux seriously. (Don't stick your toe in, just jump on in! 8^) But, I did figure it out, and now have another Linux box, my DOS/Win3.11 laptop, a Win3.11 box by the bed, a Mac, and a Win95 box hooked up, with my wife's big mac and my dad's pc coming on-line soon.

It works great -- I've had only two problems: one, PacBell was having a problem and was up again in an hour (like any ISP might have) and once the modem had to be reset. So, yes, I'm quite happy. PacBell provides the DSL Modem, the NIC for whatever type of computer you have (PC or Mac, ISA, PCI, NuBus, or PCMCIA) and sets it all up for you. The guy that did it for me handled everything except setting the card up under Linux -- he was a windows guy (nice nonetheless). I already had wiring in place, but he would have run it if I didn't from the garage to the attic.

The best part is the cost. The setup (includes the modem and NIC) is $199, but the monthly fee for 384K download/128K upload is $50 ($39/mo for the DSL and $10 for the ISP stuff) and includes a static IP. However, that's a minimum guaranteed download speed -- I've regularly gotten over 1.5mbps download speeds.

So, I have to say I am most happy with my PacBell DSL service and can recommend it highly, if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I hate to break it to you, but Pac*Bell is the best of the RBOC's (the baby bells), nationwide, according to my friends who run national ISPs. Be glad you don't live in NYNEX or GTE territory.

The real problem is that legacy telephone companies are so invested in voice telephony and circuit switching that packet switching is a mystery to them. They Don't "Get It." They can generally be trusted to run wires or give you a point-to-point bit-pipe (i.e. a dedicated leased line), but never ask them for a switched data service (e.g. frame relay, ATM, SMDS) because they'll always fuck it up. ISDN is a borderline case, because it looks and smells like voice to them, but it has never been tariffed (priced) correctly: ISDN calls should have the same price as voice calls.

There was an article in Wired a while ago called, The NetHeads versus The BellHeads which described some of this cluelessness, and how Internet companies are eating the RBOCs and other LECs alive.

If you're looking for xDSL service, best to go with one of the Competitive LECs, e.g. Covad, or NorthPoint, because it's a lead-pipe cinch that your RBOC will hose up the Internet part of xDSL, even if they get the basic bit-pipe right.

The City of Stockholm, Sweden got it right - they laid down dark fibre all over the city, and then set up a city-owned corporation to lease it out to all comers. This makes it easy to get really high speed data service at low prices. Right on the edge of the Silicon Valley, the City of Palo Alto, California has the same opportunity (i.e. they've laid down the dark fibre) but they're hesitating to actually use it! (idiots)