Yeah, Club Fed (Lompoc FPC) was real hell. They made me write AP/AR financial software for the BOP using Clipper Summer '87 on an XT. Before getting in the computer department at Lompoc I was on the irrigation crew (think hay fields) with Ivan Boesky humping lines of sprinklers through tall wet grass.
When I got out I went back to broadcast engineering, keeping local radio stations on the air. Then the Internet started and I worked with some locals and people from Seattle to get more than 9 dial-up lines in my small town. Found a good geek woman and we both ended up in Seattle working for Wolfe.net where I answered a cry from Malda for bandwidth. Seems that slashdot's T1 wasn't able to deal with the load and they were looking for someone to host images. I was at an ISP that had a whopping T3 so I set up an old Pent 90 with slackware and apache and handed it over to them. We hosted images.slashdot.org for about a year or so.
At that ISP I took to heart the spammers of the day, mostly teen customers that wanted to "make money fast." I would first try to call them and advise them that it was against the AUP, but would often get the parents. If that didn't work I'd disable the account until the parents would call (of course, they paid the bill.) This was back in the dial-up days and you could do that stuff.
Anyway, my wife and I rode the I-boom up and down, saved some money and now live on an Indian reservation looking over Puget Sound. I now spend my days as an independent field tech going around and fixing things. Life is good.
There was a big flap in Anchorage back in the early oughts when the wrong address went to the PSAP. I was at ACS working on another project and had a desk in the CO next to a working redundant 911 call center that they had built for the lawsuits that came from that incident. (Something like a cop got killed at home and it took them two hours to find the house.) Fun to have a chance to poke at a off-line PSAP and see what made them tick.
But for standard lines these days (and anytime since the late 70s) CPC, or Called Party Control, should send a signal to reverse the polarity of the calling party to indicate release (on a coin station that's how they collect the coin.)
I remember working C64 BASIC code to hack out call progress detection back in the early 80's. Had a Code-A-Phone where we pulled the 8042 microcontroler and emulated it with the C64. The Teltone/SSI chips (981, etc.) really saved our asses. Then I figured out how to brute-force calling card numbers with the hardware. Long story short, three years in Club Fed.
At least you eventually get to watch it. When are you Aussies going to send your MasterChef over? The one we got in the US was just one day a week and had Gordon Ramesy.
Don't worry, I've torrented every episode, Jr., too. We're still picking favorites for this year. Kevin going so early was a shame, but Jules really stepped up for not having made pasta before.
The one show that I do download each episode of, six days a week, is MasterChef Australia. Best damn cooking/contest show out there. I torrent it because I live in the US and TEN (the AU network) blocks video from non-AU IP addresses. GoT? I've never seen it, so happy to trade them for it.
Anyway, if you want to watch a good cooking show that isn't 'Housewives' with food, or Gordon Ramsey yelling, catch MasterChef AU. Real people that actually cheer on their competitors.
(Tried MKR but we couldn't get that interested in it, don't know why.)
That eye-glasses shadow in his picture sure makes him look evil. But my wife says that she's seen him look like that without his glasses. I remember at LISA '96 I asked him a question (ok, it was kinda stupid) and he responded, "RTMF. Next!" But then again at a later LISA he, even though he was sick as a dog, took the time in the hallway to give my wife a detailed answer to a question about round-robin with CNAME records
The basic Technician license lets you have full privileged above 50MHz. It's about as hard as getting a food worker permit. The FCC rules for ham are designed for experimentation. They let people use 1.5KW (input, not ERP) to feed gain antennas at VHF/UHF to bounce signals off the moon. I can't recall anything that wouldn't let you pump a few dozen watts into the ground.
Email me if you need help getting licensed.
Also note that ham and wifi share some bandwidth, but a ham can run much more power. Some people mod OTS wifi devices to use ham only frequencies for long haul microwave backbones. You ID by putting you callsign in as the MAC.
Ground Penetrating Radar research? How much power do you need? There are nice chunks of UHF, SHF and EHF frequencies available to hams. (http://www.arrl.org/frequency-allocations) Are there other US TLAs that keep you from pointing you ham antenna at the ground? (CQ CQ CQ DX!) You would just have to incorporate your call sign in your modulation every 10 minutes.
And regarding PNW rain, Terabeam Free Space Optics started in Seattle. I had rackspace in the same colo that they started in (Westin Building.)
That reminds me of a time in high school when we "gained access" to the "computer room" (a teletype in a closet), formed a 2' loop of paper tape with LF chars, and make prank teletype calls around town.
Ah, the things we would think of before the Internet.
But I'm old. My first technical job was as an engineer at the local radio station. The AP wire was an actual current loop that feed Baudot to a electro-mechanical printer. (77 baud.)
To be technical, my laser print is dot-matrix, just lots of dots. The only non-matrix printers that I can recall were line-printers, Selectrics (I had one with RS-232, now THAT was a terminal) and the daisy-wheel. I guess that pen-plotters could be a subgroup.
I've often thought that it can't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format of the data in the little 256-byte EEPROMs that store the channel information.
I'm guessing that you're working with RSS. I have an old 286 for dealing with that. At one time I did have a unix program that would code the EPROM for a Syntor, still had to sneaker net a floppy over to a DOS box with the burner.
Anyway, narrow-banding should soon rid you of all that old cruft, just make sure a ham gets it and not the dumpster.
I still have an old Leading Edge 286 for programming old Motorola radios. Almost brings a tear to my eye when I boot up and see Norton Commander again.
As a kid I got zapped by a neon light transformer (7.5KV) and anything after that seems tame. That did get me into the proper mindset when I was working on broadcast transmitters though.
My wife gets all pissed at me when I replace switches and outlets without turning the breaker off. I just tell her that I always act like there is live power anyway so it just makes me even more careful. If you know how electricity works and actually THINK about what you are doing...
This device is a thin client for use in places like retail store look-up and POS terminals. Think Lowe's, Home Depot, LensCrafters, PEP Boys, AutoZone, WalMart, Costco, &etc. People forget how big a market retail IT is.
Oh, and Pat, your/. UID is old enough to have used images.slashdot.org which was a Pent 90 box running slackware that I setup in Seattle at Wolfe.net when/. saturated their T1. Slackware was a big part of how/. got started.
You were allowed to run your own email server, without getting a license?
Having run large email services on both the corporate and ISP sides, you might not get much fight from me on that.
I'm sure that people from 100ish years ago would be shocked to hear that I need a license to run a transmitter of any real power. Maybe the future of geek networking will be like ham radio. Pass a various tests to prove that you know enough not to shit on the environment and you get more and more permissions. Ham radio already has 44/8 on the IP side, maybe a nice chunk of IPv6 space for amateur network use will come in to play.
Look at how radio developed with all the differentiated services that require licenses. Buying RF bandwidth? You already have to "buy" your IP space from ARIN (or whatever you local IR is) and prove that you know how to use it correctly, if you want a big chunk that you announce (broadcast) yourself. Need something for your business? There's Part 90 channels (static IPs) from your radio shop (ISP.) Need something for the home consumer? Ya got yer Part 15 FRS radios (RFC 1918) crap for that.
Then there are the companies that already straddle the two worlds: cell carriers.
I would look to the history of radio for a future history of networking regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Club Fed (Lompoc FPC) was real hell. They made me write AP/AR financial software for the BOP using Clipper Summer '87 on an XT. Before getting in the computer department at Lompoc I was on the irrigation crew (think hay fields) with Ivan Boesky humping lines of sprinklers through tall wet grass.
When I got out I went back to broadcast engineering, keeping local radio stations on the air. Then the Internet started and I worked with some locals and people from Seattle to get more than 9 dial-up lines in my small town. Found a good geek woman and we both ended up in Seattle working for Wolfe.net where I answered a cry from Malda for bandwidth. Seems that slashdot's T1 wasn't able to deal with the load and they were looking for someone to host images. I was at an ISP that had a whopping T3 so I set up an old Pent 90 with slackware and apache and handed it over to them. We hosted images.slashdot.org for about a year or so.
At that ISP I took to heart the spammers of the day, mostly teen customers that wanted to "make money fast." I would first try to call them and advise them that it was against the AUP, but would often get the parents. If that didn't work I'd disable the account until the parents would call (of course, they paid the bill.) This was back in the dial-up days and you could do that stuff.
Anyway, my wife and I rode the I-boom up and down, saved some money and now live on an Indian reservation looking over Puget Sound. I now spend my days as an independent field tech going around and fixing things. Life is good.
There was a big flap in Anchorage back in the early oughts when the wrong address went to the PSAP. I was at ACS working on another project and had a desk in the CO next to a working redundant 911 call center that they had built for the lawsuits that came from that incident. (Something like a cop got killed at home and it took them two hours to find the house.) Fun to have a chance to poke at a off-line PSAP and see what made them tick.
But for standard lines these days (and anytime since the late 70s) CPC, or Called Party Control, should send a signal to reverse the polarity of the calling party to indicate release (on a coin station that's how they collect the coin.)
I remember working C64 BASIC code to hack out call progress detection back in the early 80's. Had a Code-A-Phone where we pulled the 8042 microcontroler and emulated it with the C64. The Teltone/SSI chips (981, etc.) really saved our asses. Then I figured out how to brute-force calling card numbers with the hardware. Long story short, three years in Club Fed.
IIRC, you're a downwinder.
Or what they did to the MasterChef finals last year. That was a bomb!
(Not that it personally bothered me since I live in the US and torrent it.)
At least you eventually get to watch it. When are you Aussies going to send your MasterChef over? The one we got in the US was just one day a week and had Gordon Ramesy.
Don't worry, I've torrented every episode, Jr., too. We're still picking favorites for this year. Kevin going so early was a shame, but Jules really stepped up for not having made pasta before.
The one show that I do download each episode of, six days a week, is MasterChef Australia. Best damn cooking/contest show out there. I torrent it because I live in the US and TEN (the AU network) blocks video from non-AU IP addresses. GoT? I've never seen it, so happy to trade them for it.
Anyway, if you want to watch a good cooking show that isn't 'Housewives' with food, or Gordon Ramsey yelling, catch MasterChef AU. Real people that actually cheer on their competitors.
(Tried MKR but we couldn't get that interested in it, don't know why.)
That eye-glasses shadow in his picture sure makes him look evil. But my wife says that she's seen him look like that without his glasses. I remember at LISA '96 I asked him a question (ok, it was kinda stupid) and he responded, "RTMF. Next!" But then again at a later LISA he, even though he was sick as a dog, took the time in the hallway to give my wife a detailed answer to a question about round-robin with CNAME records
I totally respect the man.
The basic Technician license lets you have full privileged above 50MHz. It's about as hard as getting a food worker permit. The FCC rules for ham are designed for experimentation. They let people use 1.5KW (input, not ERP) to feed gain antennas at VHF/UHF to bounce signals off the moon. I can't recall anything that wouldn't let you pump a few dozen watts into the ground.
Email me if you need help getting licensed.
Also note that ham and wifi share some bandwidth, but a ham can run much more power. Some people mod OTS wifi devices to use ham only frequencies for long haul microwave backbones. You ID by putting you callsign in as the MAC.
Ground Penetrating Radar research? How much power do you need? There are nice chunks of UHF, SHF and EHF frequencies available to hams. (http://www.arrl.org/frequency-allocations) Are there other US TLAs that keep you from pointing you ham antenna at the ground? (CQ CQ CQ DX!) You would just have to incorporate your call sign in your modulation every 10 minutes.
And regarding PNW rain, Terabeam Free Space Optics started in Seattle. I had rackspace in the same colo that they started in (Westin Building.)
Yeah, but my AIM65 still has a virus from a cassette that I borrowed from a friend.
That reminds me of a time in high school when we "gained access" to the "computer room" (a teletype in a closet), formed a 2' loop of paper tape with LF chars, and make prank teletype calls around town.
Ah, the things we would think of before the Internet.
But I'm old. My first technical job was as an engineer at the local radio station. The AP wire was an actual current loop that feed Baudot to a electro-mechanical printer. (77 baud.)
The biohazard symbol was the tracing of a 7" reel-to-reel spindle. The radiation symbol is a 10" reel-to-reel spindle.
Obvious to anyone that was an AV geek in the 70s.
To be technical, my laser print is dot-matrix, just lots of dots. The only non-matrix printers that I can recall were line-printers, Selectrics (I had one with RS-232, now THAT was a terminal) and the daisy-wheel. I guess that pen-plotters could be a subgroup.
But yeah, Okidata FTW!
Here I was hoping that this would be a day free of culture.
FB OM, thx fer the DX de w7com.
I've often thought that it can't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format of the data in the little 256-byte EEPROMs that store the channel information.
http://www.onfreq.com/syntorx/
I'm guessing that you're working with RSS. I have an old 286 for dealing with that. At one time I did have a unix program that would code the EPROM for a Syntor, still had to sneaker net a floppy over to a DOS box with the burner.
Anyway, narrow-banding should soon rid you of all that old cruft, just make sure a ham gets it and not the dumpster.
I still have an old Leading Edge 286 for programming old Motorola radios. Almost brings a tear to my eye when I boot up and see Norton Commander again.
As a kid I got zapped by a neon light transformer (7.5KV) and anything after that seems tame. That did get me into the proper mindset when I was working on broadcast transmitters though.
My wife gets all pissed at me when I replace switches and outlets without turning the breaker off. I just tell her that I always act like there is live power anyway so it just makes me even more careful. If you know how electricity works and actually THINK about what you are doing...
This device is a thin client for use in places like retail store look-up and POS terminals. Think Lowe's, Home Depot, LensCrafters, PEP Boys, AutoZone, WalMart, Costco, &etc. People forget how big a market retail IT is.
I'm guessing that this is for thin-client use. Lot's of that going on in retail these days. Lowe's, PEP Boys, LensCrafters, I could go on.
Oh, and Pat, your /. UID is old enough to have used images.slashdot.org which was a Pent 90 box running slackware that I setup in Seattle at Wolfe.net when /. saturated their T1. Slackware was a big part of how /. got started.
Your above server specs remind me of my old FreeBSD (4.something) box wharfrat.nethead.com.
You were allowed to run your own email server, without getting a license?
Having run large email services on both the corporate and ISP sides, you might not get much fight from me on that.
I'm sure that people from 100ish years ago would be shocked to hear that I need a license to run a transmitter of any real power. Maybe the future of geek networking will be like ham radio. Pass a various tests to prove that you know enough not to shit on the environment and you get more and more permissions. Ham radio already has 44/8 on the IP side, maybe a nice chunk of IPv6 space for amateur network use will come in to play.
Look at how radio developed with all the differentiated services that require licenses. Buying RF bandwidth? You already have to "buy" your IP space from ARIN (or whatever you local IR is) and prove that you know how to use it correctly, if you want a big chunk that you announce (broadcast) yourself. Need something for your business? There's Part 90 channels (static IPs) from your radio shop (ISP.) Need something for the home consumer? Ya got yer Part 15 FRS radios (RFC 1918) crap for that.
Then there are the companies that already straddle the two worlds: cell carriers.
I would look to the history of radio for a future history of networking regulation.