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Altair obviously is not named after some star in Aquila. It is named after the MITS Altair 8800 which was an instant, overwhelming success and its bus became the de facto standard.. and the 8800 was in turn named after a star in Star Trek and not in Aquila. See the emulator. Though these guys think the 8800 was named after the movie Forbidden Planet, but it could also have been Altair sf magazine, which probably was named after a star in Aquila. Of course Altair also means "the flyer" in Arabic which is better than considering it an ill-starred lover. Though any of the above would provide for great mission logos too. Anyway it is difficult to work out who named what since the 8800 was named after the star Altair that the Starship Enterprise was heading for, but the Space Shuttle Enterprise was obviously named after the Star Trek Starship, or maybe after a balloon, or a seafaring ship, and probably not Branson's suborbital.

That is good to know, my family lives in NC, so I spend much of the summer here (Jacksonville - home of the 24/7/365 sausage festival), and I was going to look for an internship in the area.
University of South Alabama - CIS Department - A great school.

So I think advantage: Newton, as well.

I think you misspelled Liebniz. =)

The ratio will vary from paper to paper, but I think that consistently you can assume that advertisements are paying for the bulk of the cost for any media.

In some arrangements, advertisement is high enough that the cost for the product is actually free -- radio is free, broadcast television is free, basic cable channels are "free", etc. In other cases, the audience pays for some or all of the cost that goes into production -- subscription fees for newspapers & magazines, the additional cost of premium cable channels, etc. In still others, the publication takes little or not commercial sponsorship, and the audience has to bear the cost explicitly -- think "Consumer Reports", public broadcasting, and technical publications like scientific journals (aren't "Science" & "Nature" each in the ballpark of $1000/year?).

If you look at things in terms of "following the money", then most media are not there to deliver a product (information, entertainment) to the audience, but to sell that audience to their sponsored advertisers. The only [partial] exception I can think of is public broadcasting, where the audience is the sponsor, and is begged for money several times a year. But really, that's not an exception -- that's just making the dynamic that's always there more visible to the general public.

This dynamic sheds a lot of light on the advertiser/subscriber ratio that goes into the costs of any media, including newspapers. The idea is that a non-paying audience is worth some value N, but a paying audience must be more valuable, because the act of paying a subscription fee demonstrates that they actively want this product. That's why, of the three biggest newspapers here in Boston, the Globe & Herald are both fifty cents per day, but the Phoenix has experimented for the past few years with not charging anything for a copy. This has probably increased their readership while impacting their income; if they can sell that larger audience to their advertisers, then maybe they come out ahead anyway -- I don't know. But for the other two papers, I'm sure that both (and every other fee-charging paper in the country/world) are using their paid subscription population as a bargaining chip with advertisers.

So putting all this together, web publications are just another point on the spectrum. Since very few sites have managed to do well with a subscription model (WSJ.com and Salon being maybe the most prominent attempts), most are leaning towards the advertising end of the spectrum -- just like radio, TV, and the "Boston Phoenix". This is a model that has been used for many decades now, so it's not like the web is just starting to "catch up" with traditional newspapers. Indeed, since most newspapers have seen steadily declining readership for the past 15 years or so, its not necessarily that the web is learning the newspaper world's tricks, but that one is coming up while the other is coming down. Maybe.

More optimistically, I prefer to think that the web is starting to mature & hit its stride, and certain areas are beginning to become self-sufficient & even profitable. Not all, obviously, but we're moving beyond nonsense like Pets.com :-)

(Note that, even though I happen to work for a newspaper's site, I don't speak for my employer. Moreover, I'm not giving away anything that I didn't learn in media studies 101 in college -- the economics of mass media is a well studied & analyzed subject. Just to be clear about that

Windows 95 can be a major problem when working with a newbie who still thinks that the mouse is a "foot pedal" like that on a sewing machine (yes it's true, I actually had a call like that). (emphasis added)

I don't believe you. I've heard the same story from many people who claimed it happened to them when they worked the support lines. This is almost a urban legend of sorts. A search on Google turns up the same story all over the place.

http://www.cyberspaceplace.com/nightbeforepgrm.htm l
http://www.mathstat.usouthal.edu/humor.html
http://eserver.org/cyber/befuddle.txt
http://www.laughnet.net/archive/compute/helpme.htm
http://www.auricular.com/TST/tst1.html
http://www.elsop.com/wrc/humor/truetech.htm

According to one of Norway's most respected computer gurus, Gisle Hannemyr, this isn't correct; Email is older than 30 years. There is an article about this in the Norwegian computer magazine digi.no. I'll try to translate the most important bits of the article to English:

"- When we talk about e-mail being 30 years old (ie. it was invented in October 1971), it might be because Tomlinson also made an e-mail solution called SENDMSG and CPYNET for BBN's proprietary Tenex network in 1971."

Hannemyr further says that this is pretty irrelevant when it comes to e-mail over the ARPAnet (and Internet); "- It is e-mail we send over the today's Internet which is 30 years old. E-mail itself is much older, and have been around since the MIT-developed Compatible Time Sharing System in the sixties."

Whatever is right, I guess we all can conclude that without e-mail, we would have had time to live a normal life. All of us... :-)

--
No, I didn't write this signature

They may not care for this kind of "corporate" news site, but they don't seem to have a problem accepting their ad dollars. Gotta love the way Slashdot puts the smack down with one hand while happily accepting the greenbacks with the other. You're just so much better than these other guys, riiiiiiight.

Corporate may not be so bad anyway. Who knows, maybe Slashdot could go [even more] corporate and it would pay for some spell / fact checkers. Ok that's asking too much, this is an "amateur" site. Riiiight. *wink wink*

One of my professors in schoool was the guy responsible for calculating the trajectory from Earth to the Moon (& back). Once the vehicle left earth orbit, it followed a path charted out by William Owen, now PhD and a professor at the University of South Alabama.

There had to have been dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people like him that had a direct role in getting the spacecraft there & back again. If this whole thing was a hoax, he probably would have known it, and a whole lot of other people besides him would have known it. Swearing such a large group of people -- mostly civilians, mind you -- to secrecy is probably just about impossible.

How then can it have remained such a big secret? Aside from Dan Ackroyd's character in "Sneakers" [1], this is a pretty minor conspiracy theory, and one with far less supporting evidence than some of the others. The people at Fox seem to have spent too much time watching the X-Files and believing every minute of it.

[1] And let's not forget some of Mr Ackroyd's other wacky ideas, e.g. all the nutty stuff he said in everything from "Ghostbusters" to "Grossse Pointe Blank" -- that wasn't just part of the script, he really believes in astral projection, Gozer, etc. Hardly a good spokesperson for a solid scientific discussion...

Several teams from my school have been working on this for a couple of years now. They've got a page up at this link.

Interestingly -- to me at least -- they aren't actually working with robots, but rather software automata that can somewhere down the line be used as the brains for autonomous soccer playing robots. To that end, they set it up so they can play a server and students can all write their own soccer playing clients that work together on teams. They're amusingly bad, but encouraging as well -- you can see where things might lead.

The home page for the research groups has some neat stuff as well. Whoa -- they even link to my old project! Ain't that nice of them... :)

Anyway, point being is that RoboCup is a big, worldwide research effort and it's not all just hardware. Interesting stuff...

Several teams from my school have been working on this for a couple of years now. They've got a page up at this link.

Interestingly -- to me at least -- they aren't actually working with robots, but rather software automata that can somewhere down the line be used as the brains for autonomous soccer playing robots. To that end, they set it up so they can play a server and students can all write their own soccer playing clients that work together on teams. They're amusingly bad, but encouraging as well -- you can see where things might lead.

The home page for the research groups has some neat stuff as well. Whoa -- they even link to my old project! Ain't that nice of them... :)

Anyway, point being is that RoboCup is a big, worldwide research effort and it's not all just hardware. Interesting stuff...

I noted that the address attached to my Slashdot account, st90300@jag uar1.usouthal.edu, is public and more or less open to spammers. The interesting thing about it is that, in my Slashdot profile, I'm not trying to obscure it the way pretty much everyone else [amusingly] does -- and yet I never get any spam that is traceably from Slashdot. (Nor has anyone ever emailed me for that matter.) I think the large degree of address obfuscation here must be offputting to marketers, who must see this site as poor fodder.

In any event, I had that in my previous comment as sort of an aside and now it's gone. What's going on here? If Slashdot comments are open to revision after posting, that is a serious issue that needs to be brought out in the open. If I had any idea that people would be able to muck around with what I was typing, I wouldn't bother to type it. I'd like an answer about this matter -- I have a hard time taking commentary seriously after realizing this can and does happen. Grrr....

Ok, so no money exchanges hands there, it might be harder to argue in a court. But my web page now (nevermind my profile, I need to update it) is on a web server at a public university. I pay tuition and am the primary administrator of this machine -- I like to think of it as mine even though it really isn't. If I put that Nader site here, with all kinds of fun stuff like petitions and links and essays and endorsements and yadda yadda yadda, is someone supposed to pay then?

This is stupid. I can almost follow the FEC's logic: expensive equipment is being used. If you were to publish in a newspaper or run a radio or television broadcast ad, you would have to pay the publisher of that media for the space. In this case, you've already paid for it (via tuition & fees) but from a certain point of view it's the same thing.

But that's an insane point of view. Would it be better to pay by the percentage of clock cycles or disc space that goes to serving out the political page? Arguably, but it's a weak argument at best.

God I hope this doesn't stand up in court...