I don't think its really a contest, while points are collected - and extra points are given for non petrol based power, cw and satellite contacts - there are no paper awards to be handed out.
I don't know about that. My old club was never really competing against other clubs, but they did keep track of their score and tried to improve it every year. And there are some mega-clubs that treat it very seriously and do compete. It always flipped me out to hear a station respond that they were in category "20A"--meaning 20 transmitters on emergency power.
I really liked Field Day. It was the only serious HF contest operating I've ever gotten to do, I didn't even really have an HF rig set up at home until this March. It's good training in operating on crowded bands in marginal conditions. And it's fun. I was hearing myself say "This is Kilo-Four-Hotel-Echo-XRay, please copy Three-Alpha Virginia" in my sleep for a week afterwards.:)
Re:Further OT: A quicker & dirtier transmitter
on
Field Day 2002
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· Score: 1
Sorta kinda.
They call it RST--Readability, Strength, Tone.
Readability is how clear and understandable your signal is, and that goes from 1 (all but unintelligible) to 5 (clear).
Strength is how strong your signal is. Most people use the 1-9 readings on the signal meter on their rig to get this number. Sometimes you'll hear folks say "you're coming in 20 over 9"--means that the needle on the S meter is pointing to the +20 dB mark past S9.
Tone is for Morse only and is how good your beeps sound, from 1 (that's supposed to be Morse?) to 9 (nice beeps!).
A perfect signal report on voice is 59, on CW (Morse) it's 599. A lot of people just give a "59" report no matter what--I have a small low-power ham rig (Yaesu FT817) and a crappy antenna, and I know that I'm not getting to Honduras with a 59 signal--yet that's what I got from an operator in Honduras recently.
I'll be at home in the air conditioning this weekend, making a few contacts to the people sweltering out in tents and shelters. Been there, done that, taking this year off.:)
Go for it. I have a 955DF that I got for $319 less $40 rebate at Best Buy last year...it's not top-end by any stretch, limited to 60 Hz at 1600x1200 if you want to run that high, but it does a good job for the price.
You got an email saying that their privacy policy had been changed and to click a link to go review your personal settings. I just happened to notice the marketing ones. So they can plausibly argue (in court) if they have to that they did tell users to go review the settings.
Um...I belong to ten groups and I never got such an email.
I already average four telemarketer calls a night (three machine hangups and one live person), I don't need any more.
Taco, you've got major balls. When I proposed a couple of years ago, I did it on a deserted beach, so in case she said no, nobody'd see me go down in flames.:)
Congrats, man. Maybe your bride-to-be's website will un-slashdot by tonight (yeah, riiiight).
Prices for those items, when they're sold--which isn't often--have gone up as more platinum has entered the economy. These super-rare items that don't drop anymore are often held as "investments". I've known a couple of people that have had rubicite that just hung onto it until they needed the money for some useful item (high-end weapon or haste item, etc.) and then sold it.
Take rubicite armor. Rubicite, early in EQ's life, was considered to be excellent armor. It only dropped in one place (the Temple of Cazic-Thule), very rarely, and when compared to the armors existing at the time--banded, bronze, etc.--was strong. C-T turned into a campground with people trying to get rubicite. It was a mess.
So they yanked it out of the game and replaced it with various mid-level class "quest" armors--crafted for warriors, darkforge for shadowknights, etc. They didn't do anything with existing pieces of rubicite, but it simply disappeared from all the monsters' loot tables.
Nowadays, rubicite is crap compared to what 2/3 of the twinks on the server are wearing. But it's red, and it's rare, and it has a sort of old-school legendary quality, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for it. So, players that have the stuff hang onto it and sell it when the price is right. It doesn't sound any different than the real-life equivalent of buying rare art or collectibles--by themselves, they aren't "useful", but for whatever reason there's people out there willing to pay excessive amounts of money for them.
There's other no-longer-dropping items, like manastones and pre-nerf Circlets of Shadow, that keep their value because they're actually useful. (Manastones let you turn health into spellcasting mana instantly, and the CoS used to allow the wearer to instantly turn invisible. Verant changed it to have a 5-second casting time, but they left older ones as instant-cast.) Rubicite just looks cool as hell.
Personally, on my server (Innoruuk) I don't keep up with trading that much because I'm bad at it. But from what little I know, manastones, rubicite, super-rare stuff from zones like Temple of Veeshan, etc., are subject to inflation. They don't enter the economy faster than the money supply increases, unlike 99% of the other items in the game.
Really, the problem seems to be that items enter the economy faster than money. It's hard to earn more than a couple thousand plat in a night's play, even if you're camping things like hill giants that carry a lot of coin and sellables. (And remember, you'll probably have to split that money among your group, up to six ways.) But it's trivial to go into, say, Old Sebilis, sit for a couple hours and score 10k worth of items to sell.
As a longtime Evercrackhead, I can give you some examples of why the economy deflates.
When the game started out, relatively mundane items were pretty powerful because no one as yet had gotten to the high-level areas with the "phat loot". Early on, a guy running around in simple bronze platemail was a rare sight. Weapons with a damage/delay ratio of 1:3 (or 1:2 for two-handed swords and the like) were godly and commanded godly prices--if they were sold at all.
As time went on there was inflation, as people gained thousands of platinum pieces (the EQ currency) and bid up the prices of those items. But the inflation reversed itself after a while.
Items don't decay in EQ. They don't wear out. The only way they leave the world is if they are destroyed by a player, on a character when it is deleted, or poof when a corpse poofs. So as time went on, more and more of the items entered the economy, and better and better stuff was found. Verant has added three expansions over the past two years, and each one has had better toys and phatter loot. As that stuff enters circulation, the former "godly" stuff becomes less valuable and typically gets passed down to lower-level "twinks" (alternate characters equipped with hand-me-down or purchased loot that's better than what they could get on their own) or sold.
Using an example--there's an EQ weapon called a Short Sword of the Ykesha. It looks like a Ghurka khukri knife, and will occasionally hit a target with a 75-point damage spell. In the early game, it used to be the bad-ass one-handed sword, a rare drop off a tough level 40ish monster in a very tough dungeon (Lower Guk). When they would be sold, which was rare, they would go for 8,000+ plat.
Well, since the Kunark, Velious, and now Luclin expansion packs, there's stuff out there that makes the Ykesha look totally lame--plus, the number of Ykeshas on the server gradually increased over time, as more and more people entered that dungeon and killed that particular monster. The price of the weapon spiked up on my server as people started scoring a lot of money, but once the better weapons entered the picture the price went into freefall. Now "Yaks" go for 1000 plat or even less.
It's an odd combination--people have more plat than ever before, but prices are simultaneously falling. The result is that there are level 5 twinks running around in gear that my warrior didn't have at level 40 18 months ago.
The same thing happens as new servers are brought online, but it happens faster there because people already know exactly where to go to maximize their income and their chance at items.
Verant has tried to introduce money sinks to reduce the amount of money in circulation (horses that cost 110k plat, for example), but that won't solve the deflation. Item decay might, but it's way too late in the game's lifecycle to introduce that. If I end up spending 15 hours of my no-life to camp the Frenzied Wumpus for the Ass-Kicking Widget of Doom, there's no way I want my widget to break or wear out in a couple months.
In short--the deflationary aspect in EQ doesn't seem to have much to do with the money supply, it's got more to do with the supply of items that people want to trade for.
My wife's going to cook up some nice tenderloin filets we bought yesterday, and maybe some yellow rice. Followed by some ice cream, probably, or maybe I'll just skip the ice cream and go for some alcohol. (But I'm on call for work, so I can't get wasted, or go out.)
After that, maybe we'll sit back and mock some TV (Dick Clark's 1571th annual "Rockin'" New Years Eve), and see if we can see people getting mugged in Times Square when the ball drops. If not, there's always Everquest.
Oh yeah, and then I'll boink my wife. Hey, it's our first NYE together married.
Then tomorrow, I'll sit around the house and pray work doesn't call...
Re:Servers were never allowed out on cable
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Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, Road Runner here in South Carolina is the same way. Check out this little piece of draconian legalese from http://www.sc.rr.com/userterms.htm:
5. Subscriber Conduct
d) Subscriber will not resell the Road Runner Service, or any portion thereof, or otherwise charge others to use Road Runner, or any portion thereof. Further, Subscriber will not redistribute the Road Runner Service, or any portion thereof, whether or not Subscriber receives compensation for such redistribution. The Road Runner Service as offered under this Agreement is a residential service offered for personal, noncommercial use only. Subscriber agrees not to use the Road Runner Service for operation as an Internet service provider, for the hosting of websites or for any business enterprise. Subscriber further agrees not to connect the cable modem to any computer other than the Computer(s) or to any server (or any computer running server applications that provide similar protocol services over the Road Runner Service), including without limitation any servers for mail, HTTP, FTP, RTP, IRC, DHCP, or multi-user interactive forums (e.g. gaming).
(added emphasis is mine)
So, technically, I'm in violation of the terms of service because I've got a Netgear router hooking three PCs (two running ME, one running RH 7.1) to the cable modem. If I want to hook three computers up to their cable, according to them, I have to pay them $9.95/month each for two extra IPs...oh, but sorry, you can't hook the third box up, we don't support Linux, it doesn't exist!
This, despite the fact the installer told me I should get a router when he saw my half-disassembled RH box sitting next to my main computer. The installer, though, didn't work for TWC, he was a contractor they pay to do the digital cable and RR installs.
I haven't heard of them blocking port 80 down here yet, but I'm sure they will soon. I hate giving these guys $40 a month for this, but given the horror stories I've heard with Bellsouth (aka Bellsuck) DSL installs, and given that South Carolina's somewhere behind, oh, say, Yemen in the technology area, I don't know what other alternatives I have.
AOL's operations are in the Washington, DC suburbs. Rick Boucher's district is the Ninth, which is a large chunk of southwestern Virginia including the New River Valley (Christiansburg, Blacksburg, Radford). That area is a self-proclaimed "technology corridor" and contains Virginia Tech, and all the technology initiatives VT has been sponsoring. Hell, Blacksburg's the most wired place in the state, more so than any of the bigger cities or even the DC burbs.
I doubt the Republicans will be able to throw Boucher out anytime soon, he's been representing that area for a long long time and wins in landslides every two years. He's also fairly conservative for a Democrat, and has brought a lot of stuff home to his district (of course, we all know that bringing home the pork trumps party lines most of the time). I'm a conservative Republican and I've always liked Boucher, actually. I don't agree with a lot of his views, but he's got tech issues nailed better than just about anybody in Congress right now.
We got Anna'd here too. Personally, I'm trying to figure out why every single person that sent it to me was female. Not a single man opened that attachment. I think I'm skeered.
...ask any of us that were on Egroups mailing lists (seven, for me) and had to go through a half-hour of resetting crap after Yahoo just Borged Egroups last week.
I'll grant that they are better about providing open access to content than AOHell or Disney (and we see how well that's working for Disney, don't we?) or any of the others, but do you think it'd really make that much of a difference if Yahoo got bought out?
Oh yeah...like, uh, I'm guessing, ninth post. Or something.
They might've been RP06s, come to think of it. Push the button, wait for it to spin down, open the lid, put the plastic thing on top of the platter, spin until it locks, lift, give yourself hernia. Reverse process to reinstall.
I also did 3 years of COBOL programming on a Unisys A15 (later A19) for a major US credit card company. Yes, Unisys A-series use 48-bit words (we used six 8-bit bytes), and they're a monster pain in the ass to program COBOL on. They don't pack and store their numeric data in the same way as IBMs (translation: Everybody Else In The World) do it. Packed fields could actually be fractional bytes--a 7-digit field would be 3.5 bytes--and the next field would start in the middle of that fourth byte. Plus they put the sign on the front of the field, instead of the end. And in general, their OS made me weep for the days of TOPS-20 or VMS. CANDE was the suckiest editor I ever had the displeasure of using, especially after 3 years of ISPF and 3 years of vi.
Sadly, I never got to program on that '2060, just play at being an operator. Oh, and occasionally call the DEC service center in Colorado Springs, when something went haywire. I remember watching some tech there take over our machine through the 1200-baud modem, as his commands echoed over the console. Hey, at 16, I thought that was some cool shit.:)
Didn't those DECSYSTEM-20s have a PDP-11 in there as some sort of front-end processor? I seem to remember my boss telling me there was a PDP-11/43 in there somewhere...like I knew what a PDP-11/43 was at age 16 growing up in rural Virginia. I was too busy checking out the student op's 34Cs.:)
My very first job, in 1981-82 when I was still in high school, was working at the computer center at Sweet Briar College as a general gofer and weekend scut-work operator. At the time, SBC had a DECSYSTEM-2060. My job was pretty simple--come in at night sometimes to print big jobs, burst and de-carbon them, clean up, etc. On the weekends I'd print some big stuff they normally ran on Saturday mornings, hang the backup tapes, vacuum the printer, and otherwise be bored out of my freakin' mind, while lusting after the weekend student operators (SBC's a high-priced private women's college).
The main thing I remember about that job was the disk drives. I don't remember the DEC model number, but we had three, and they were each the size of a washing machine, had the big removable 20-pound 10- or 11-platter disks, and held, each, a whopping 200+ MB! Woohoo! (Now I've got 40 GB in a 3.5" form factor in my new PC at home...God, I love technology.)
I liked that 2060. I got decent at doing basic operator functions--startup, shutdown, queue management, etc. I even wrote school papers using whatever their runoff language was, and printed them on one of the typewriter-style terminals in the offices. It was just a very easy and straightforward system to use. And it sure helped when I got to college two years later and found myself working on a VAX 11/785.
Besides, I've been working with obsolete mainframes ever since, so that 2060 got me started on my career path.:)
Amateur Radio callsigns are handed out by the FCC in a set pattern--one or two letters, one number, and one to three letters.
The first one or two letters indicate the country of origin. The US gets prefixes A, K, N, W, AA-AL, KA-KZ, NA-NZ, and WA-WZ. Which prefix you get depends on which license class you're being licensed for.
The number indicates the geographic area of the country the licensee was living in when they got the license. Area "7" (as in K7QVC) is the Pacific Northwest--Oregon, Washington, maybe Idaho and Montana, I'm not sure.
The last 1-3 letters are handed out in alphabetical order. It's now possible to request a "vanity" callsign or request an old callsign of a dead/no longer licensed operator, too.
So when I got my Technician ticket in 1992 I was licensed as KD4QDP. When I upgraded to Advanced in 1995 I reapplied and got KS4RY. If I ever get an Extra class license, and reapplied, I think I'd end up with something like AF4XX or AG4XX.
Hmm, wonder if they ever gave anybody N2FUK or KD5SEX? Time to dig through the callbooks...
That's the American Radio Relay League, the major ham organization in the US. I don't always agree with 'em, but they're a good place to start.
Radio Shack also used to carry a couple of pretty decent books on getting through the tests (they're what I used to pass the Technician test in '92 and General/Advanced tests in '95). They also had Morse code learning tapes if you want to get into that (you'll need to learn Morse to get license privileges below 30 MHz).
Good luck with it. I've been a ham for eight years now, mostly into VHF, emergency work, and public service work (my HF station is in pieces in the closet right now, damn apartments) and I love it.
I'm a mainframe programmer, and have to carry a cellphone two weeks out of every eight--one week as primary support, one week as backup. I get paid exactly zero dollars and zero cents extra for the privilege (the joys of being on salary).
Fortunately, we rarely get called. We can go 2-3 weeks without a single call. Therefore, since our mainframe COBOL/CICS apps actually work, upper management is now busy trying to replace them with client-server stuff running on NT servers. And, when they do, we'll still have to take on-call for them, and still get paid US$0.00 for the privilege.
Federal requirements? No. But local jurisdictions should have every right to put blocking software on their library computers. Or, as somebody else suggested in a thread a couple days back, have some filtered and some unfiltered computers, and have parents indicate on the minor's library card whether they're allowed filtered or unfiltered access.
Keep the control at the local and parental level. Keep the federal government the hell out of it.
Almost, but not exactly, something unlike a fr0st p1st.
Why would GNU rate its own TLD? Wouldn't you then be able to have.lnx,.w9x,.unx,.aix,.os2,.dos, and a whole ton of others? Sounds kinda like they're opening a can of worms if they approve a.gnu TLD.
But what do I know. I program mainframes in COBOL.
This is an interesting concept...What about redundancy for integrity? Not to play the Devil's advocate here, but assume that you are running Linux on an S/390, and doing the work of 400 Sun server (figure courtesy of abcnews.com), and there is one HUGE power spike and the S/390 goes down. Goodbye enterprise because that was your ONLY system.
Well, any decent mainframe installation is going to be heavily secured against disasters--massive battery backups, generators, etc. And the biggest companies have entire duplicate systems at other sites, ready to be brought up in the event of a disaster.
Now that's not gonna protect you if your building burns down, but then again your multiple smaller Linux servers would be burnt too. Unless you physically distributed them in different sites, and doesn't that make administration a bitch? (Excuse my ignorance, I'm just a mainframe toad.)
Very interesting point about the recruiting of S/390 programmers. I'm probably one of the last of the COBOL Mohicans--got out of school in 1987 with a degree and scads of COBOL training and went right to work on IBM heavy iron. Now it's 13 years later and at age 33 I'm the youngest mainframe programmer I know.
Most 390s are probably still running old COBOL stuff, that's my guess. And the knowledge pool for that old software is drying up. So if a business can keep that monster humming in the basement and shift to a "modern" language, thus allowing them to recruit new talent...hey, why not? And maybe they can teach a couple of the new guys some COBOL to keep the old applications running until they can be ported over.:)
This is a very smooth move on IBM's part. I would've never imagined IBM and Linux ever being mentioned in the same breath...they seem like such polar opposites, y'know?
I work on a fairly small mainframe (oxymoron) running OS/390, programming COBOL on loan systems on a small co-op bank--I've got a PII/450 running W98 on my desk that only gets used as a 3270 emulator (and Web browser when the boss isn't looking). There's nothing new, sexy, or "hip" about S/390 mainframes, but they are dead solid reliable. They just don't break.
So of course our CIO is hellbent on scrapping our ugly but functional COBOL-based systems for the Brave New World of client/server, VB 6, SQL Server 7, Microsoft everything, distributed processing, blah blah blah. Forget what works, it isn't New! and Improved! so we dump it and go for eye candy. This is why I like seeing stuff like this--keep that super-reliable raised-floor gear but bring it forward into the 21st century, or at least the mid-90s.
This sure seems like the best of both worlds--mainframe reliability and *nix flexibility. Now, when the heavy iron operations people meet the Linux geeks, that is gonna be fun...
Software to brainwash people into doing web searches? Nah. He just gives 'em some "coins" on iwin.com, so they have a 1:1,000,000 chance of winning a DVD player. Oh yeah, my first post ever on Slashdot. W00t.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about that. My old club was never really competing against other clubs, but they did keep track of their score and tried to improve it every year. And there are some mega-clubs that treat it very seriously and do compete. It always flipped me out to hear a station respond that they were in category "20A"--meaning 20 transmitters on emergency power.
I really liked Field Day. It was the only serious HF contest operating I've ever gotten to do, I didn't even really have an HF rig set up at home until this March. It's good training in operating on crowded bands in marginal conditions. And it's fun. I was hearing myself say "This is Kilo-Four-Hotel-Echo-XRay, please copy Three-Alpha Virginia" in my sleep for a week afterwards. :)
They call it RST--Readability, Strength, Tone.
Readability is how clear and understandable your signal is, and that goes from 1 (all but unintelligible) to 5 (clear).
Strength is how strong your signal is. Most people use the 1-9 readings on the signal meter on their rig to get this number. Sometimes you'll hear folks say "you're coming in 20 over 9"--means that the needle on the S meter is pointing to the +20 dB mark past S9.
Tone is for Morse only and is how good your beeps sound, from 1 (that's supposed to be Morse?) to 9 (nice beeps!).
A perfect signal report on voice is 59, on CW (Morse) it's 599. A lot of people just give a "59" report no matter what--I have a small low-power ham rig (Yaesu FT817) and a crappy antenna, and I know that I'm not getting to Honduras with a 59 signal--yet that's what I got from an operator in Honduras recently.
I'll be at home in the air conditioning this weekend, making a few contacts to the people sweltering out in tents and shelters. Been there, done that, taking this year off. :)
Go for it. I have a 955DF that I got for $319 less $40 rebate at Best Buy last year...it's not top-end by any stretch, limited to 60 Hz at 1600x1200 if you want to run that high, but it does a good job for the price.
Um...I belong to ten groups and I never got such an email.
I already average four telemarketer calls a night (three machine hangups and one live person), I don't need any more.
Congrats, man. Maybe your bride-to-be's website will un-slashdot by tonight (yeah, riiiight).
Take rubicite armor. Rubicite, early in EQ's life, was considered to be excellent armor. It only dropped in one place (the Temple of Cazic-Thule), very rarely, and when compared to the armors existing at the time--banded, bronze, etc.--was strong. C-T turned into a campground with people trying to get rubicite. It was a mess.
So they yanked it out of the game and replaced it with various mid-level class "quest" armors--crafted for warriors, darkforge for shadowknights, etc. They didn't do anything with existing pieces of rubicite, but it simply disappeared from all the monsters' loot tables.
Nowadays, rubicite is crap compared to what 2/3 of the twinks on the server are wearing. But it's red, and it's rare, and it has a sort of old-school legendary quality, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for it. So, players that have the stuff hang onto it and sell it when the price is right. It doesn't sound any different than the real-life equivalent of buying rare art or collectibles--by themselves, they aren't "useful", but for whatever reason there's people out there willing to pay excessive amounts of money for them.
There's other no-longer-dropping items, like manastones and pre-nerf Circlets of Shadow, that keep their value because they're actually useful. (Manastones let you turn health into spellcasting mana instantly, and the CoS used to allow the wearer to instantly turn invisible. Verant changed it to have a 5-second casting time, but they left older ones as instant-cast.) Rubicite just looks cool as hell. Personally, on my server (Innoruuk) I don't keep up with trading that much because I'm bad at it. But from what little I know, manastones, rubicite, super-rare stuff from zones like Temple of Veeshan, etc., are subject to inflation. They don't enter the economy faster than the money supply increases, unlike 99% of the other items in the game.
Really, the problem seems to be that items enter the economy faster than money. It's hard to earn more than a couple thousand plat in a night's play, even if you're camping things like hill giants that carry a lot of coin and sellables. (And remember, you'll probably have to split that money among your group, up to six ways.) But it's trivial to go into, say, Old Sebilis, sit for a couple hours and score 10k worth of items to sell.
When the game started out, relatively mundane items were pretty powerful because no one as yet had gotten to the high-level areas with the "phat loot". Early on, a guy running around in simple bronze platemail was a rare sight. Weapons with a damage/delay ratio of 1:3 (or 1:2 for two-handed swords and the like) were godly and commanded godly prices--if they were sold at all.
As time went on there was inflation, as people gained thousands of platinum pieces (the EQ currency) and bid up the prices of those items. But the inflation reversed itself after a while.
Items don't decay in EQ. They don't wear out. The only way they leave the world is if they are destroyed by a player, on a character when it is deleted, or poof when a corpse poofs. So as time went on, more and more of the items entered the economy, and better and better stuff was found. Verant has added three expansions over the past two years, and each one has had better toys and phatter loot. As that stuff enters circulation, the former "godly" stuff becomes less valuable and typically gets passed down to lower-level "twinks" (alternate characters equipped with hand-me-down or purchased loot that's better than what they could get on their own) or sold.
Using an example--there's an EQ weapon called a Short Sword of the Ykesha. It looks like a Ghurka khukri knife, and will occasionally hit a target with a 75-point damage spell. In the early game, it used to be the bad-ass one-handed sword, a rare drop off a tough level 40ish monster in a very tough dungeon (Lower Guk). When they would be sold, which was rare, they would go for 8,000+ plat.
Well, since the Kunark, Velious, and now Luclin expansion packs, there's stuff out there that makes the Ykesha look totally lame--plus, the number of Ykeshas on the server gradually increased over time, as more and more people entered that dungeon and killed that particular monster. The price of the weapon spiked up on my server as people started scoring a lot of money, but once the better weapons entered the picture the price went into freefall. Now "Yaks" go for 1000 plat or even less.
It's an odd combination--people have more plat than ever before, but prices are simultaneously falling. The result is that there are level 5 twinks running around in gear that my warrior didn't have at level 40 18 months ago.
The same thing happens as new servers are brought online, but it happens faster there because people already know exactly where to go to maximize their income and their chance at items.
Verant has tried to introduce money sinks to reduce the amount of money in circulation (horses that cost 110k plat, for example), but that won't solve the deflation. Item decay might, but it's way too late in the game's lifecycle to introduce that. If I end up spending 15 hours of my no-life to camp the Frenzied Wumpus for the Ass-Kicking Widget of Doom, there's no way I want my widget to break or wear out in a couple months.
In short--the deflationary aspect in EQ doesn't seem to have much to do with the money supply, it's got more to do with the supply of items that people want to trade for.
My wife's going to cook up some nice tenderloin filets we bought yesterday, and maybe some yellow rice. Followed by some ice cream, probably, or maybe I'll just skip the ice cream and go for some alcohol. (But I'm on call for work, so I can't get wasted, or go out.)
After that, maybe we'll sit back and mock some TV (Dick Clark's 1571th annual "Rockin'" New Years Eve), and see if we can see people getting mugged in Times Square when the ball drops. If not, there's always Everquest.
Oh yeah, and then I'll boink my wife. Hey, it's our first NYE together married.
Then tomorrow, I'll sit around the house and pray work doesn't call...
(added emphasis is mine)
So, technically, I'm in violation of the terms of service because I've got a Netgear router hooking three PCs (two running ME, one running RH 7.1) to the cable modem. If I want to hook three computers up to their cable, according to them, I have to pay them $9.95/month each for two extra IPs...oh, but sorry, you can't hook the third box up, we don't support Linux, it doesn't exist!
This, despite the fact the installer told me I should get a router when he saw my half-disassembled RH box sitting next to my main computer. The installer, though, didn't work for TWC, he was a contractor they pay to do the digital cable and RR installs.
I haven't heard of them blocking port 80 down here yet, but I'm sure they will soon. I hate giving these guys $40 a month for this, but given the horror stories I've heard with Bellsouth (aka Bellsuck) DSL installs, and given that South Carolina's somewhere behind, oh, say, Yemen in the technology area, I don't know what other alternatives I have.
I doubt the Republicans will be able to throw Boucher out anytime soon, he's been representing that area for a long long time and wins in landslides every two years. He's also fairly conservative for a Democrat, and has brought a lot of stuff home to his district (of course, we all know that bringing home the pork trumps party lines most of the time). I'm a conservative Republican and I've always liked Boucher, actually. I don't agree with a lot of his views, but he's got tech issues nailed better than just about anybody in Congress right now.
I'll grant that they are better about providing open access to content than AOHell or Disney (and we see how well that's working for Disney, don't we?) or any of the others, but do you think it'd really make that much of a difference if Yahoo got bought out?
Oh yeah...like, uh, I'm guessing, ninth post. Or something.
I also did 3 years of COBOL programming on a Unisys A15 (later A19) for a major US credit card company. Yes, Unisys A-series use 48-bit words (we used six 8-bit bytes), and they're a monster pain in the ass to program COBOL on. They don't pack and store their numeric data in the same way as IBMs (translation: Everybody Else In The World) do it. Packed fields could actually be fractional bytes--a 7-digit field would be 3.5 bytes--and the next field would start in the middle of that fourth byte. Plus they put the sign on the front of the field, instead of the end. And in general, their OS made me weep for the days of TOPS-20 or VMS. CANDE was the suckiest editor I ever had the displeasure of using, especially after 3 years of ISPF and 3 years of vi.
Sadly, I never got to program on that '2060, just play at being an operator. Oh, and occasionally call the DEC service center in Colorado Springs, when something went haywire. I remember watching some tech there take over our machine through the 1200-baud modem, as his commands echoed over the console. Hey, at 16, I thought that was some cool shit. :)
Didn't those DECSYSTEM-20s have a PDP-11 in there as some sort of front-end processor? I seem to remember my boss telling me there was a PDP-11/43 in there somewhere...like I knew what a PDP-11/43 was at age 16 growing up in rural Virginia. I was too busy checking out the student op's 34Cs. :)
The main thing I remember about that job was the disk drives. I don't remember the DEC model number, but we had three, and they were each the size of a washing machine, had the big removable 20-pound 10- or 11-platter disks, and held, each, a whopping 200+ MB! Woohoo! (Now I've got 40 GB in a 3.5" form factor in my new PC at home...God, I love technology.)
I liked that 2060. I got decent at doing basic operator functions--startup, shutdown, queue management, etc. I even wrote school papers using whatever their runoff language was, and printed them on one of the typewriter-style terminals in the offices. It was just a very easy and straightforward system to use. And it sure helped when I got to college two years later and found myself working on a VAX 11/785.
Besides, I've been working with obsolete mainframes ever since, so that 2060 got me started on my career path. :)
The first one or two letters indicate the country of origin. The US gets prefixes A, K, N, W, AA-AL, KA-KZ, NA-NZ, and WA-WZ. Which prefix you get depends on which license class you're being licensed for.
The number indicates the geographic area of the country the licensee was living in when they got the license. Area "7" (as in K7QVC) is the Pacific Northwest--Oregon, Washington, maybe Idaho and Montana, I'm not sure.
The last 1-3 letters are handed out in alphabetical order. It's now possible to request a "vanity" callsign or request an old callsign of a dead/no longer licensed operator, too.
So when I got my Technician ticket in 1992 I was licensed as KD4QDP. When I upgraded to Advanced in 1995 I reapplied and got KS4RY. If I ever get an Extra class license, and reapplied, I think I'd end up with something like AF4XX or AG4XX.
Hmm, wonder if they ever gave anybody N2FUK or KD5SEX? Time to dig through the callbooks...
There's still a listening post in WV, Sugar Grove...at least there was a few years ago, I'm not sure if it's still open or not.
That's the American Radio Relay League, the major ham organization in the US. I don't always agree with 'em, but they're a good place to start.
Radio Shack also used to carry a couple of pretty decent books on getting through the tests (they're what I used to pass the Technician test in '92 and General/Advanced tests in '95). They also had Morse code learning tapes if you want to get into that (you'll need to learn Morse to get license privileges below 30 MHz).
Good luck with it. I've been a ham for eight years now, mostly into VHF, emergency work, and public service work (my HF station is in pieces in the closet right now, damn apartments) and I love it.
Old hams are the original geeks. :)
73 de KS4RY
Fortunately, we rarely get called. We can go 2-3 weeks without a single call. Therefore, since our mainframe COBOL/CICS apps actually work, upper management is now busy trying to replace them with client-server stuff running on NT servers. And, when they do, we'll still have to take on-call for them, and still get paid US$0.00 for the privilege.
Keep the control at the local and parental level. Keep the federal government the hell out of it.
Almost, but not exactly, something unlike a fr0st p1st.
But what do I know. I program mainframes in COBOL.
ObFirstPost: fr1st p0st?
Well, any decent mainframe installation is going to be heavily secured against disasters--massive battery backups, generators, etc. And the biggest companies have entire duplicate systems at other sites, ready to be brought up in the event of a disaster.
Now that's not gonna protect you if your building burns down, but then again your multiple smaller Linux servers would be burnt too. Unless you physically distributed them in different sites, and doesn't that make administration a bitch? (Excuse my ignorance, I'm just a mainframe toad.)
Most 390s are probably still running old COBOL stuff, that's my guess. And the knowledge pool for that old software is drying up. So if a business can keep that monster humming in the basement and shift to a "modern" language, thus allowing them to recruit new talent...hey, why not? And maybe they can teach a couple of the new guys some COBOL to keep the old applications running until they can be ported over. :)
I work on a fairly small mainframe (oxymoron) running OS/390, programming COBOL on loan systems on a small co-op bank--I've got a PII/450 running W98 on my desk that only gets used as a 3270 emulator (and Web browser when the boss isn't looking). There's nothing new, sexy, or "hip" about S/390 mainframes, but they are dead solid reliable. They just don't break.
So of course our CIO is hellbent on scrapping our ugly but functional COBOL-based systems for the Brave New World of client/server, VB 6, SQL Server 7, Microsoft everything, distributed processing, blah blah blah. Forget what works, it isn't New! and Improved! so we dump it and go for eye candy. This is why I like seeing stuff like this--keep that super-reliable raised-floor gear but bring it forward into the 21st century, or at least the mid-90s.
This sure seems like the best of both worlds--mainframe reliability and *nix flexibility. Now, when the heavy iron operations people meet the Linux geeks, that is gonna be fun...
Software to brainwash people into doing web searches? Nah. He just gives 'em some "coins" on iwin.com, so they have a 1:1,000,000 chance of winning a DVD player. Oh yeah, my first post ever on Slashdot. W00t.