I've used the Basic Stamp for several projects in the past (and present!), and I have found the 'P-BASIC' language fun to use. The projects I've used the Basic Stamp for have ranged from controllers for complex electric doors (that require several motions with different motors in succession, where the stamp registers each motion as complete and starts the next motion) to complex remote operations piggybacked on top of X10 involving sensors, servos, etc etc.
The film industry has used them for some time now for set design and filming equipment - to a greater extent than most people realize. They're cheap, almost infinately flexible, and don't have too rough of a learning curve.
Those of you that are dismissing them as worthless toys ought to have a closer look at them to see what they have been used to create. If you use your imagination you can come up with tons of great things to do with these things. I hate to do that anymore though (imagine), as I've come up with enough such projects to fill three lifetimes!
I hesitate to say this here in fear of killing my karma, but I'd say the usefullness of them surpasses their LEGO counterparts by a significant margin. If you're into such projects, have a look at them, you won't be disapointed.:)
--SONET (who is not associated with the company(ies) related to this story by any means)
"Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them." -Ann Landers
I just wanted to give my thanks for your involvement (and everyone elses) in the Samba project. I now have four servers at an elementary school running Samba, one of which actually just went up today. The one that went up today was replacing a Win32 machine that had nothing but problems from day one.
It's difficult to get teachers to depend on something other than a chalkboard... the flaky Windows server certainly wasn't helping their confidence in the file server idea. It took a major dive last week so I finally made the somewhat time-intensive transition to Linux/Samba.
I've never had a single problem with any of the servers I have running Samba on Linux (a couple have 250-300 day uptimes!). My only wish would be for Samba to be faster / more intuitive to configure without having to use a GUI or web interface.:) Anyhow, it's nice to have one less Windows machine to worry about... without your efforts I would have had more ruined weekend plans to look forward to.
Thanks again for your efforts, --SONET http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
I think this will be remembered as an era of waste. That is really sad that they are just going to let those things go into the atmosphere. Imagine how these could be used in education. A college with decent funding could take one of these satellites and do really neat things with it and really learn lots to boot. Shoot, they might even make something useful out of it. Imagine attending a college and getting hands-on experience with satellite technology. Now *that* would be neat.
Motorola charged hundreds of millions per year to keep those things running. But what were they really charging for? All the money probably went to well-paid man power and the rest to profits. A university could probably run one of these at a relatively low cost. And even better, the company would receive huge tax breaks for donating the satellites.
Perhaps a university could experiment with different ways to utilize aging technology. They wouldn't have to use it for the purpose it was intended. I'm sure for what these things cost, they must have some sort of flexibility in terms of programming them to do different things from Earth.
So... how do I get ahold of these guys to give them the idea of donating them to education?:)
Speaking of hardware, why does everyone keep saying to get a 2.5" drive? Is it just because of the size? Don't 2.5" drives and 3.5" IDE drives work the same? I have several 1GB drives laying around collecting dust, but they're 3.5". I don't care if I have to bolt it to the outside of the box... will it work?
Didn't Apple do this in 1984 with the original Macintosh? You know... that box I made a fishtank out of.:)
Ohh yeah, and that one had a floppy drive too.
Why is it that people have such a hard time giving Apple credit where credit is due? I'm no Apple zelot but you really have to hand it to them, like them or not - Apple had lots of 'firsts'.
*Companies* ultimately exist for the sole purpose of making *money*. Apple has made *money* on the iMac, like it or not. Other *companies* see this and they too want to make *money*. Therefore they copy the iMac to make... *money*. That is their *goal*, afterall, and I think they did have a long look at their *goals* because they probably started a *company* to make *money*.
Is there something difficult here that you missed or perhaps I'm missing?:)
--SONET (in a smart-ass mood because there's no coffee to be had around here)
I just want to take this oppertunity to say Squid totally rocks. I put a squid server on a rescued 486/66 with 24MB of RAM. By rescued I mean that when the processor was removed from an old donated Compaq Prolinea server, it flew out of my hand and landed on concrete - then got stepped on while I was trying to find it and every pin got flattened (oops! found it!), and I had to straighten each pin with a butterknife to shove it in the Squid box! Honest! And that's only the processor story! Anyhow, you get the point - we're talking about really crappy and abused hardware I'm working with here.
We have roughly 100 machines on our network, and Internet access was coming to a standstill - especially when everyone in the computer lab was on the Internet. Imagine a 128Kb/s fractional T1 with 25 *active* users all trying to look at mega-image-rich content, plus some other users on campus accessing the Internet at the same time (can you say sub-300 baud and ping times measured in whole-second increments?). I was having to pre-load web sites before a class came into the computer lab because just loading the first page could take roughly five minutes on a good day.
Then I configured and installed a Squid server on a rejuvinated Compaq Deskpro running Linux 2.2 that was donated with the above said specs. I was a little sketchy to implement it across the entire campus at first because I had always heard that proxy servers were a Bad Thing. So I silently pointed browsers to the Squid machine in a few classrooms to see if I would hear anything from anyone. I got calls from people that very day. They were asking me how I had finally coaxed our school district into buying us such a fast connection!
As it goes, the more classrooms I pointed to the proxy server, the faster things got (as the cache was growing and the hit rate was increasing), and the more happy teachers I had. In a school situation, many sites are visited multiple times by different students and classrooms. In the computer lab, every computer often visits the same site as a class. So having a caching-proxy server helps a great deal! I really believe that every school with less than a T1 should have one.
As for statistics, I have an average 'hit' rate of well over 80% because of the multiple viewings of sites. Initially I had 2GB set aside for caching purposes (on an IDE Samsung 2.1GB drive), and I found that as it reached its capacity the server just got way too slow. So first I brought it down to 1.5GB, and now I have it at 1GB (I may even take it to 750MB). It has been running pretty fast at 1GB - by far compared to not having a caching-proxy server at all, but I do see the performance start to degrade at about 750MB with my particular hardware.
Sure, faster server hardware would be *great* and is probably necessary to handle our unusually heavy load due to all of the graphics content on the visited sites, but right now that just isn't an option because we live on donations. My point is that even though we are running Squid on such a crappy box, it has worked wonders on our network. Internet access seems very fast now, whereas before it was almost unbareable. And most importantly people are happy and making use of the technology we have to its fullest extent, where as before they may not have been able to do this. I must admit though that I am writing grants in hopes of getting a faster/newer box because ours is getting tired and I worry about what will happen when the hardware finally kicks the bucket.:)
For a school in our situation, Squid is great because it even helps when you're using it on otherwise possibly worthless hardware, and the price is just right.
Anyways, I'd like to thank all who have donated their time on the Squid project, you've done great work and you're helping people more than you realize!
I'm actually a technology coordinator / technology instructor at an elementary school at what is considered 'technology magnet' school (too bad no extra funds come with that title hehe).
It's my job to teach the students about computers and how to work them, and to also teach the teachers how to use their computers (along with doing the web site, making donated equipment work and placing it, purchasing new equipment, etc etc).
I have to comment on what somebody said earlier in this thread. They said that most teachers aren't intelligent. I really think that could have been stated more intelligently:) . Most are intelligent, however their intelligence lies in a different area. Logical thinking isn't usually their strength. And computers are almost entirely logical by nature. That's where the problem lies. The people who create programs for computers, including operating systems, are extremely logical thinkers and naturally they create their programs based on their own thinking patterns. Apple has done a better job than anybody of getting away from this (though they have a long way to go yet) and teachers respond to it by sticking to Apple whenever they have the chance (but schools like ours aren't *allowed* to buy Apple products!). People who are more apt to use the other side of their brain tend to like Apple's products.
I have an inservice to give next week on e-mail usage and web page design where half the teaching staff is required to attend. Based on past experience, it is likely that some will call in sick!
I think where the weakness lies is not in the teachers, but rather in the programmers failure to create products usable by all of the people that should/would/could be using them. GUI's have come a really long way considering the relatively short time they have been in existance, but they obvoiusly still have a long way to go! Every computer that is on this campus required at least an hour of my time before it was put into use to organize things in such a way that the teachers would me more comfortable using them. I have found that machines that are organized in such a fashion are used on average more than twice as much as machines that aren't. Even then, they could be designed much better in the first place.
My current project is to find a way to make Linux usable by the teachers and other staff here. At this stage I have been experimenting with different configurations in KDE. I may also experiment with some different WM's. At this point I really don't think it's ready.
For whatever reason, be it Y2K or whatever... I can't seem to access hotmail.com. I don't know what posessed me to check it in the first place, I haven't checked it in monhts.
Anyone else having problems? I've been trying for about 5 minutes now.
Sort of a tangent to what you were saying, but somewhat on-topic too...:)
There is actually another way of installing fibre that is a bit more future-proof than the traditional way that they are installing it in most situations today. I'm not sure of the name for the technique, but the company(ies?) that markets it calls it 'Air Blown Fiber'.
Installers bury conduits that have sub-conduits inside (looks like honeycomb when you look at the cross-section). Each internal conduit is independent of the other. After the conduit is laid out and in-place (buried etc), the installer shoots a 'BB' through each mini-conduit to make sure it is clear (using a big air tank and some special equipment).
Once it is determined clear and safe, the installer places a strand of fibre (protected but very light-weight - no kevlar!) into one of the conduits and 'blows' it through. Air pushes the strand(s) of fibre to the other side. It does this *very* fast, somewhere between 50-100FPS if I remember correctly. I was amazed to find that damage to the fibre strand is not an issue when they do this... it's actually quite rare. Installers I talked to said it was much more rare than the damage that occurs to the fibre in a conventional installation.
The idea behind it is: yes, you have to dig the initial hole and bury the conduit. But you'll never have to do it again. The conduit has many extra mini-sections for later expansion if you ever want to add more fibre (you can buy conduits with 2-72 mini-conduits, and each holds up to 6 strands of fibre), and if the fibre becomes outdated or destroyed for whatever reason, you just yank it out (using the same method in reverse if you want) and blow different fibre through. You can even blow a fibre through, remove it, then reinstall the same one multiple times with no problems.
I worked with a project at the National Department of Energy (Fermi) where this technique was used, as well as at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Southern California. Some universities are also adopting this method.
The amazing thing is that it's actually considerably less expensive than the conventional installation technique. Where's the catch? I don't know/that/ much about fibre installations, but I haven't found any.
Pretty neat stuff, sorry no URL. I'm sure a Google search on 'air blown fiber' would return some good results.:)
I live in California (Orange County) and I have been very pleased with Sprint PCS. I haven't had a single dropped call in the 6 months I've been using them, and the calls are always clear. I was using Airtouch for 4 years before I started with Sprint and I was dropped daily no matter where I was and the signal always sucked.
Sprint PCS doesn't have coverage all over the place, but they have it in San Francisco and in Maui, Hawaii... those are the only two places I go anyways - for business and vacation respectively. I have a dual-band phone so it really doesn't matter if I'm out of their coverage area (that's only happened a few times) since I can just use the service of a different [analog] provider when I'm out of their area.
--SONET (a rat swimming in milk... wait, what was I just saying? )
I have a couple friends that were born into quite a bit of money - one of them especially. When he turned 18 his dad bought him a huge $3M house on a nice golf course. His parents give him money for a new car every 9 months (he has 5 cars now). All bills are sent to the parents house and covered. He even gets $15,000 per month 'allowance' on top of all that, and extra money for traveling whenever he decides to.
Last year, he told his dad he hated his classes in college. Guess what? His dad paid someone to go to class for him. He hasn't been to school since (people are still being paid to go for him). He's going to graduate before I am with a higher GPA and he isn't even going to school.
The sad thing is that he is probably the single most depressed person I know. What does he have to live for? Where are his challenges? He has none... he has no self-worth.
My other friend born into wealth has the same problem... nothing to worry about and nothing to look forward to. As much as we all hate worries, everybody needs something to worry about sometimes...
So... it is my experience that people born into money aren't necessarily ones to be jelouse of... but rather people to have pity on.
The Optiplex G1 tower is extremely easy to get into. All you have to do is press a button on the front and the side cover pops off. Good idea provided its in the right environment. They even have it set up so that you can put a padlock or 'security cable' so you can lock it down.
One negitive aspect of moving over to the metric system is that of prices which we buy things in volume - the best example I can think of for this would be gasoline.
Britain has been suffering from this unforseen phenomena since they converted to the metric system. Think about it... if you raise the price of a gallon of gas 1 cent, it doesn't end up being that much more for twenty gallons of fuel. Raise it one cent per liter and the change becomes a bit more significant. Raising the price of fuel 5 cents per liter doesn't sound like that much to those used to paying the per gallon price, but in reailty it's quite a hike.
If and when the US does move over to the metric system this will certainly be one of the bigger drawbacks (until everybody gets used to it, that is!). Oil companies *will* take advantage of this, as will other entities. The government is another that comes immediately to mind. Hiking taxes even higher than they already are without the average consumer realizing what happened. The taxes on fuel in states like Hawaii and especially California are already astronomical as it is.
Just a thought:) --SONET http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
Caching proxies rock. I have one that I put up on my network at work (serving to roughly 120 client machines) and it makes such a *huge* difference. And it's just a (donated Dell desktop) dedicated P75 w/ 24MB RAM and 1GB cache. On a LAN like ours, if you shut off the disk cache in the browsers on each of the client machines and up the memory cache a bit (say 2-8MB depending on the machine) it works great.
If everyone used caching proxies, the Internet would be so much faster. *sigh* And 'little problems' like this would be less of a setback.
"Having money has made my life a bit more comfortable," said Estrin. "I fly first class, have fulltime childcare and don't have to budget much. That's it."
Fulltime childcare is a rise in the standard of living? I would think having more time to be at home with your family would be better, instead of always being at work and having someone else live your life and raise your children for you.
I was reading a similar article in Info World where a man was quoted as saying "I'm gone on business all the time. My son's teacher didn't even believe I existed. Finally one day I made an appearance to show her my son really had a father."
I think it's pathetic that people think it's a Good Thing(tm) that they can pay someone else to raise their children full-time and that others find it comical that they are away from their families so much. To think that they wonder why they have so many problems with their children later in life. How stupid and self-centered can these people get? Are they really doing all this just to support their families? I think not.
I work at a school in a high income area where I see this happening to the kids all the time. Some of them are here from 7am to 7pm only to be picked up by a nanny, who usually ends up being the one to tuck them in at night. Sad.
I agree that it's sad to see they are laying off 3,000 employees. But think about it for a second. SGI isn't in business to give people jobs. They are in business to make money. These people will find other jobs. How they handle the employees who were dropped from payroll is more of an issue than anything else at this point (i.e. will they provide support to the layed off workers in getting a new job, etc.)
If they aren't making enough to stay afloat (or if they forecast that they won't be), they obviously need to push some of the dead weight overboard. Otherwise they will be destined to sink.
It's always funny to me when people post stuff like this.... saying companies are so bad to do this. Try owning your own company for a while - especially during a slump in your market segment or during a recession - and see what you think then. When it comes down to it, it's either a few of the sailors now or the whole ship later. Which is worse then?
If they didn't do this type of thing to stay in business, I would be more worried about buying their product than if they did. There's nothing worse than owning hardware from a company that no longer exists.
Some IMAX movie theatres already use this technology. I have been to one in Irvine, California USA that uses glasses that are polorized, and they are constantly synched via infrared. The glasses actually use LCD's of their own to turn them on and off, one on each eye, flashing at different times. I actually got a pair with weak batteries (I think that's what the problem was, I forget it was a few years ago) at the beginning of the first time I went and it messed things up pretty good.
Anyway, you thought up a neat idea and the technology already exists - it could definately be applied to this privacy idea somehow I'm sure.
How convenient of you to post as an AC, clever thinking there.:)
I agree that there is a ton of useless bureaucracy in public education, and some systems are corrupt as well - especially in the larger districts. However, I can't think of any way an elementary school could find anything corrupt to do with such a donation. Perhaps you could reveal yourself and explain how an elementary school could do anything that you could classify as 'corrupt' with donated hardware.
If the system is indeed corrupt, then that would mean the students aren't getting what they should be getting - the technology necessary to learn skills that will be required of them when they become part of the real world. It goes without saying that this is really wrong. However, I think it is even worse if somebody has the means to help the kids by donating 'useless' hardware and helping and not doing it. That's just ignoring the problem, hoping it will go away as it just continues to get worse.
It is one thing to sit around and bitch about things, it is another to shut up and actually do something positive about them. Personally I don't have any extra hardware laying around to donate. Instead, I donate my time to make a difference. Maybe I'm making up for something someone else is paid to do and isn't doing it. Or maybe I'm doing something that would have otherwise never have been done. Either way, I'm not sitting around bitching about the situation.
FYI there have been a couple Slashdotters who have helped us out in the [recent] past. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have our caching proxy server or our file server, or some parts that are going to make it possible to put a couple linux machines into classrooms for a test run.
Giving children access to technology... what a horrible thing to do. I would hate to see them learn any of this stuff. Instead we should let them suffer for the fact that they are involuntarily a part of a corrupt system. I mean come on, think about this for a minute...
If you don't want to post a reply here here, maybe you could e-mail me, paul.levitz@hbcsd.k12.ca.us - feel free to use your hotmail account... I'm sure you would hate to find yourself accountable for anything you might say. I will be interested to hear what you come up with.
To think someone would actually donate a 350MHz(?!) machine to this just makes me ill. Chances of this project ever even getting off the ground are slim and none, these guys are probably going to end up just using the for gaming boxes or something worthless when the project fails.
Really, if you have a computer you don't want, donate it to a school. I work/volunteer at an elementary school, and we wouldn't have literally 70% of what we have if it wasn't for hardware donations, and another 10% of what we have can be attributed to monetary contributions towards technology.
Donate it to a local school and write it off, and if you can't find a local school, we're always open to donations, working or otherwise.:)
"Please don't respond to this with "BeOS is great because blah blah blah." "
I just have to point out that it's totally annoying when someone comes up with stupid guidelines for how people should respond to their post. If you really don't want a certain anticipated response to something, refrain from including it in your post or just don't post. The great thing about slashdot is that it is an open forum and people can reply however they want. The minute that changes will be the last minute I spend here, and I would guess that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I will go on to go against the guidelines for replying you set in your post and say that BeOS is great because it is another OS out there and it is usable for some people that want to use it. Linux is the same way as is Win32 and MacOS... usable for some but not for everybody. Competition is good for everybody. Personally I use them all on a daily basis.
I'm just replying this way because I can... even if you ask me not to.:) Honestly I could care less about influencing anyone's views on BeOS - or any other OS for that matter. I nearly included a whole list about why BeOS is great along with a list why other operating systems are great (just because I can), but instead I decided to exercise a little self control today.:)
As for being disgusted with what you are reading, if it is really that bad perhaps you should stop reading the thread... nobody is forcing you to read it.
"Reply to this however you please, even if it offends me or goes against what I think... I just might learn something from what you have to say."
Slashdot Mirror
Women perhaps? :P
I've used the Basic Stamp for several projects in the past (and present!), and I have found the 'P-BASIC' language fun to use. The projects I've used the Basic Stamp for have ranged from controllers for complex electric doors (that require several motions with different motors in succession, where the stamp registers each motion as complete and starts the next motion) to complex remote operations piggybacked on top of X10 involving sensors, servos, etc etc.
:)
The film industry has used them for some time now for set design and filming equipment - to a greater extent than most people realize. They're cheap, almost infinately flexible, and don't have too rough of a learning curve.
Those of you that are dismissing them as worthless toys ought to have a closer look at them to see what they have been used to create. If you use your imagination you can come up with tons of great things to do with these things. I hate to do that anymore though (imagine), as I've come up with enough such projects to fill three lifetimes!
I hesitate to say this here in fear of killing my karma, but I'd say the usefullness of them surpasses their LEGO counterparts by a significant margin. If you're into such projects, have a look at them, you won't be disapointed.
--SONET (who is not associated with the company(ies) related to this story by any means)
"Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them." -Ann Landers
I just wanted to give my thanks for your involvement (and everyone elses) in the Samba project. I now have four servers at an elementary school running Samba, one of which actually just went up today. The one that went up today was replacing a Win32 machine that had nothing but problems from day one.
:) Anyhow, it's nice to have one less Windows machine to worry about... without your efforts I would have had more ruined weekend plans to look forward to.
It's difficult to get teachers to depend on something other than a chalkboard... the flaky Windows server certainly wasn't helping their confidence in the file server idea. It took a major dive last week so I finally made the somewhat time-intensive transition to Linux/Samba.
I've never had a single problem with any of the servers I have running Samba on Linux (a couple have 250-300 day uptimes!). My only wish would be for Samba to be faster / more intuitive to configure without having to use a GUI or web interface.
Thanks again for your efforts,
--SONET
http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
I think this will be remembered as an era of waste. That is really sad that they are just going to let those things go into the atmosphere. Imagine how these could be used in education. A college with decent funding could take one of these satellites and do really neat things with it and really learn lots to boot. Shoot, they might even make something useful out of it. Imagine attending a college and getting hands-on experience with satellite technology. Now *that* would be neat.
:)
Motorola charged hundreds of millions per year to keep those things running. But what were they really charging for? All the money probably went to well-paid man power and the rest to profits. A university could probably run one of these at a relatively low cost. And even better, the company would receive huge tax breaks for donating the satellites.
Perhaps a university could experiment with different ways to utilize aging technology. They wouldn't have to use it for the purpose it was intended. I'm sure for what these things cost, they must have some sort of flexibility in terms of programming them to do different things from Earth.
So... how do I get ahold of these guys to give them the idea of donating them to education?
--SONET
Speaking of hardware, why does everyone keep saying to get a 2.5" drive? Is it just because of the size? Don't 2.5" drives and 3.5" IDE drives work the same? I have several 1GB drives laying around collecting dust, but they're 3.5". I don't care if I have to bolt it to the outside of the box... will it work?
--SONET
Didn't Apple do this in 1984 with the original Macintosh? You know... that box I made a fishtank out of. :)
Ohh yeah, and that one had a floppy drive too.
Why is it that people have such a hard time giving Apple credit where credit is due? I'm no Apple zelot but you really have to hand it to them, like them or not - Apple had lots of 'firsts'.
--SONET
*Companies* ultimately exist for the sole purpose of making *money*. Apple has made *money* on the iMac, like it or not. Other *companies* see this and they too want to make *money*. Therefore they copy the iMac to make... *money*. That is their *goal*, afterall, and I think they did have a long look at their *goals* because they probably started a *company* to make *money*.
:)
Is there something difficult here that you missed or perhaps I'm missing?
--SONET (in a smart-ass mood because there's no coffee to be had around here)
I just want to take this oppertunity to say Squid totally rocks. I put a squid server on a rescued 486/66 with 24MB of RAM. By rescued I mean that when the processor was removed from an old donated Compaq Prolinea server, it flew out of my hand and landed on concrete - then got stepped on while I was trying to find it and every pin got flattened (oops! found it!), and I had to straighten each pin with a butterknife to shove it in the Squid box! Honest! And that's only the processor story! Anyhow, you get the point - we're talking about really crappy and abused hardware I'm working with here.
:)
We have roughly 100 machines on our network, and Internet access was coming to a standstill - especially when everyone in the computer lab was on the Internet. Imagine a 128Kb/s fractional T1 with 25 *active* users all trying to look at mega-image-rich content, plus some other users on campus accessing the Internet at the same time (can you say sub-300 baud and ping times measured in whole-second increments?). I was having to pre-load web sites before a class came into the computer lab because just loading the first page could take roughly five minutes on a good day.
Then I configured and installed a Squid server on a rejuvinated Compaq Deskpro running Linux 2.2 that was donated with the above said specs. I was a little sketchy to implement it across the entire campus at first because I had always heard that proxy servers were a Bad Thing. So I silently pointed browsers to the Squid machine in a few classrooms to see if I would hear anything from anyone. I got calls from people that very day. They were asking me how I had finally coaxed our school district into buying us such a fast connection!
As it goes, the more classrooms I pointed to the proxy server, the faster things got (as the cache was growing and the hit rate was increasing), and the more happy teachers I had. In a school situation, many sites are visited multiple times by different students and classrooms. In the computer lab, every computer often visits the same site as a class. So having a caching-proxy server helps a great deal! I really believe that every school with less than a T1 should have one.
As for statistics, I have an average 'hit' rate of well over 80% because of the multiple viewings of sites. Initially I had 2GB set aside for caching purposes (on an IDE Samsung 2.1GB drive), and I found that as it reached its capacity the server just got way too slow. So first I brought it down to 1.5GB, and now I have it at 1GB (I may even take it to 750MB). It has been running pretty fast at 1GB - by far compared to not having a caching-proxy server at all, but I do see the performance start to degrade at about 750MB with my particular hardware.
Sure, faster server hardware would be *great* and is probably necessary to handle our unusually heavy load due to all of the graphics content on the visited sites, but right now that just isn't an option because we live on donations. My point is that even though we are running Squid on such a crappy box, it has worked wonders on our network. Internet access seems very fast now, whereas before it was almost unbareable. And most importantly people are happy and making use of the technology we have to its fullest extent, where as before they may not have been able to do this. I must admit though that I am writing grants in hopes of getting a faster/newer box because ours is getting tired and I worry about what will happen when the hardware finally kicks the bucket.
For a school in our situation, Squid is great because it even helps when you're using it on otherwise possibly worthless hardware, and the price is just right.
Anyways, I'd like to thank all who have donated their time on the Squid project, you've done great work and you're helping people more than you realize!
--SONET
http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
I'm actually a technology coordinator / technology instructor at an elementary school at what is considered 'technology magnet' school (too bad no extra funds come with that title hehe).
:) . Most are intelligent, however their intelligence lies in a different area. Logical thinking isn't usually their strength. And computers are almost entirely logical by nature. That's where the problem lies. The people who create programs for computers, including operating systems, are extremely logical thinkers and naturally they create their programs based on their own thinking patterns. Apple has done a better job than anybody of getting away from this (though they have a long way to go yet) and teachers respond to it by sticking to Apple whenever they have the chance (but schools like ours aren't *allowed* to buy Apple products!). People who are more apt to use the other side of their brain tend to like Apple's products.
It's my job to teach the students about computers and how to work them, and to also teach the teachers how to use their computers (along with doing the web site, making donated equipment work and placing it, purchasing new equipment, etc etc).
I have to comment on what somebody said earlier in this thread. They said that most teachers aren't intelligent. I really think that could have been stated more intelligently
I have an inservice to give next week on e-mail usage and web page design where half the teaching staff is required to attend. Based on past experience, it is likely that some will call in sick!
I think where the weakness lies is not in the teachers, but rather in the programmers failure to create products usable by all of the people that should/would/could be using them. GUI's have come a really long way considering the relatively short time they have been in existance, but they obvoiusly still have a long way to go! Every computer that is on this campus required at least an hour of my time before it was put into use to organize things in such a way that the teachers would me more comfortable using them. I have found that machines that are organized in such a fashion are used on average more than twice as much as machines that aren't. Even then, they could be designed much better in the first place.
My current project is to find a way to make Linux usable by the teachers and other staff here. At this stage I have been experimenting with different configurations in KDE. I may also experiment with some different WM's. At this point I really don't think it's ready.
Back to work!
Just my 2 cents
--SONET
For whatever reason, be it Y2K or whatever... I can't seem to access hotmail.com. I don't know what posessed me to check it in the first place, I haven't checked it in monhts.
Anyone else having problems? I've been trying for about 5 minutes now.
Sort of a tangent to what you were saying, but somewhat on-topic too... :)
/that/ much about fibre installations, but I haven't found any.
:)
There is actually another way of installing fibre that is a bit more future-proof than the traditional way that they are installing it in most situations today. I'm not sure of the name for the technique, but the company(ies?) that markets it calls it 'Air Blown Fiber'.
Installers bury conduits that have sub-conduits inside (looks like honeycomb when you look at the cross-section). Each internal conduit is independent of the other. After the conduit is laid out and in-place (buried etc), the installer shoots a 'BB' through each mini-conduit to make sure it is clear (using a big air tank and some special equipment).
Once it is determined clear and safe, the installer places a strand of fibre (protected but very light-weight - no kevlar!) into one of the conduits and 'blows' it through. Air pushes the strand(s) of fibre to the other side. It does this *very* fast, somewhere between 50-100FPS if I remember correctly. I was amazed to find that damage to the fibre strand is not an issue when they do this... it's actually quite rare. Installers I talked to said it was much more rare than the damage that occurs to the fibre in a conventional installation.
The idea behind it is: yes, you have to dig the initial hole and bury the conduit. But you'll never have to do it again. The conduit has many extra mini-sections for later expansion if you ever want to add more fibre (you can buy conduits with 2-72 mini-conduits, and each holds up to 6 strands of fibre), and if the fibre becomes outdated or destroyed for whatever reason, you just yank it out (using the same method in reverse if you want) and blow different fibre through. You can even blow a fibre through, remove it, then reinstall the same one multiple times with no problems.
I worked with a project at the National Department of Energy (Fermi) where this technique was used, as well as at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Southern California. Some universities are also adopting this method.
The amazing thing is that it's actually considerably less expensive than the conventional installation technique. Where's the catch? I don't know
Pretty neat stuff, sorry no URL. I'm sure a Google search on 'air blown fiber' would return some good results.
--SONET
I live in California (Orange County) and I have been very pleased with Sprint PCS. I haven't had a single dropped call in the 6 months I've been using them, and the calls are always clear. I was using Airtouch for 4 years before I started with Sprint and I was dropped daily no matter where I was and the signal always sucked.
Sprint PCS doesn't have coverage all over the place, but they have it in San Francisco and in Maui, Hawaii... those are the only two places I go anyways - for business and vacation respectively. I have a dual-band phone so it really doesn't matter if I'm out of their coverage area (that's only happened a few times) since I can just use the service of a different [analog] provider when I'm out of their area.
--SONET (a rat swimming in milk... wait, what was I just saying? )
I have a couple friends that were born into quite a bit of money - one of them especially. When he turned 18 his dad bought him a huge $3M house on a nice golf course. His parents give him money for a new car every 9 months (he has 5 cars now). All bills are sent to the parents house and covered. He even gets $15,000 per month 'allowance' on top of all that, and extra money for traveling whenever he decides to.
Last year, he told his dad he hated his classes in college. Guess what? His dad paid someone to go to class for him. He hasn't been to school since (people are still being paid to go for him). He's going to graduate before I am with a higher GPA and he isn't even going to school.
The sad thing is that he is probably the single most depressed person I know. What does he have to live for? Where are his challenges? He has none... he has no self-worth.
My other friend born into wealth has the same problem... nothing to worry about and nothing to look forward to. As much as we all hate worries, everybody needs something to worry about sometimes...
So... it is my experience that people born into money aren't necessarily ones to be jelouse of... but rather people to have pity on.
Just thought I would share that
--SONET
The Optiplex G1 tower is extremely easy to get into. All you have to do is press a button on the front and the side cover pops off. Good idea provided its in the right environment. They even have it set up so that you can put a padlock or 'security cable' so you can lock it down.
--SONET
Peterson Elementary School
One negitive aspect of moving over to the metric system is that of prices which we buy things in volume - the best example I can think of for this would be gasoline.
:)
Britain has been suffering from this unforseen phenomena since they converted to the metric system. Think about it... if you raise the price of a gallon of gas 1 cent, it doesn't end up being that much more for twenty gallons of fuel. Raise it one cent per liter and the change becomes a bit more significant. Raising the price of fuel 5 cents per liter doesn't sound like that much to those used to paying the per gallon price, but in reailty it's quite a hike.
If and when the US does move over to the metric system this will certainly be one of the bigger drawbacks (until everybody gets used to it, that is!). Oil companies *will* take advantage of this, as will other entities. The government is another that comes immediately to mind. Hiking taxes even higher than they already are without the average consumer realizing what happened. The taxes on fuel in states like Hawaii and especially California are already astronomical as it is.
Just a thought
--SONET
http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
Caching proxies rock. I have one that I put up on my network at work (serving to roughly 120 client machines) and it makes such a *huge* difference. And it's just a (donated Dell desktop) dedicated P75 w/ 24MB RAM and 1GB cache. On a LAN like ours, if you shut off the disk cache in the browsers on each of the client machines and up the memory cache a bit (say 2-8MB depending on the machine) it works great.
:)
If everyone used caching proxies, the Internet would be so much faster. *sigh* And 'little problems' like this would be less of a setback.
--SONET
http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
I'm:
Straight
Gay
Pedophile
Asexual
Cucumber
Huh?
Fulltime childcare is a rise in the standard of living? I would think having more time to be at home with your family would be better, instead of always being at work and having someone else live your life and raise your children for you.
I was reading a similar article in Info World where a man was quoted as saying "I'm gone on business all the time. My son's teacher didn't even believe I existed. Finally one day I made an appearance to show her my son really had a father."
I think it's pathetic that people think it's a Good Thing(tm) that they can pay someone else to raise their children full-time and that others find it comical that they are away from their families so much. To think that they wonder why they have so many problems with their children later in life. How stupid and self-centered can these people get? Are they really doing all this just to support their families? I think not.
I work at a school in a high income area where I see this happening to the kids all the time. Some of them are here from 7am to 7pm only to be picked up by a nanny, who usually ends up being the one to tuck them in at night. Sad.
--SONET
I agree that it's sad to see they are laying off 3,000 employees. But think about it for a second. SGI isn't in business to give people jobs. They are in business to make money. These people will find other jobs. How they handle the employees who were dropped from payroll is more of an issue than anything else at this point (i.e. will they provide support to the layed off workers in getting a new job, etc.)
If they aren't making enough to stay afloat (or if they forecast that they won't be), they obviously need to push some of the dead weight overboard. Otherwise they will be destined to sink.
It's always funny to me when people post stuff like this.... saying companies are so bad to do this. Try owning your own company for a while - especially during a slump in your market segment or during a recession - and see what you think then. When it comes down to it, it's either a few of the sailors now or the whole ship later. Which is worse then?
If they didn't do this type of thing to stay in business, I would be more worried about buying their product than if they did. There's nothing worse than owning hardware from a company that no longer exists.
--SONET
Some IMAX movie theatres already use this technology. I have been to one in Irvine, California USA that uses glasses that are polorized, and they are constantly synched via infrared. The glasses actually use LCD's of their own to turn them on and off, one on each eye, flashing at different times. I actually got a pair with weak batteries (I think that's what the problem was, I forget it was a few years ago) at the beginning of the first time I went and it messed things up pretty good.
Anyway, you thought up a neat idea and the technology already exists - it could definately be applied to this privacy idea somehow I'm sure.
--Sonet
paul.levitz(AT)hbcsd.k12.ca.us
How convenient of you to post as an AC, clever thinking there. :)
I agree that there is a ton of useless bureaucracy in public education, and some systems are corrupt as well - especially in the larger districts. However, I can't think of any way an elementary school could find anything corrupt to do with such a donation. Perhaps you could reveal yourself and explain how an elementary school could do anything that you could classify as 'corrupt' with donated hardware.
If the system is indeed corrupt, then that would mean the students aren't getting what they should be getting - the technology necessary to learn skills that will be required of them when they become part of the real world. It goes without saying that this is really wrong. However, I think it is even worse if somebody has the means to help the kids by donating 'useless' hardware and helping and not doing it. That's just ignoring the problem, hoping it will go away as it just continues to get worse.
It is one thing to sit around and bitch about things, it is another to shut up and actually do something positive about them. Personally I don't have any extra hardware laying around to donate. Instead, I donate my time to make a difference. Maybe I'm making up for something someone else is paid to do and isn't doing it. Or maybe I'm doing something that would have otherwise never have been done. Either way, I'm not sitting around bitching about the situation.
FYI there have been a couple Slashdotters who have helped us out in the [recent] past. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have our caching proxy server or our file server, or some parts that are going to make it possible to put a couple linux machines into classrooms for a test run.
Giving children access to technology... what a horrible thing to do. I would hate to see them learn any of this stuff. Instead we should let them suffer for the fact that they are involuntarily a part of a corrupt system. I mean come on, think about this for a minute...
If you don't want to post a reply here here, maybe you could e-mail me, paul.levitz@hbcsd.k12.ca.us - feel free to use your hotmail account... I'm sure you would hate to find yourself accountable for anything you might say. I will be interested to hear what you come up with.
--SONET
To think someone would actually donate a 350MHz(?!) machine to this just makes me ill. Chances of this project ever even getting off the ground are slim and none, these guys are probably going to end up just using the for gaming boxes or something worthless when the project fails.
Really, if you have a computer you don't want, donate it to a school. I work/volunteer at an elementary school, and we wouldn't have literally 70% of what we have if it wasn't for hardware donations, and another 10% of what we have can be attributed to monetary contributions towards technology.
Donate it to a local school and write it off, and if you can't find a local school, we're always open to donations, working or otherwise. :)
Computer stuff we need
Just my two cents.
SONET
I read someplace that Bob Metcalfe was the brainchild of ethernet (at Xerox perhaps?). Is this true? I haven't seen anyone here post about this fact.
Anyway, if this is so, that ending statement was even more perfect.
--SONET
I just have to point out that it's totally annoying when someone comes up with stupid guidelines for how people should respond to their post. If you really don't want a certain anticipated response to something, refrain from including it in your post or just don't post. The great thing about slashdot is that it is an open forum and people can reply however they want. The minute that changes will be the last minute I spend here, and I would guess that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I will go on to go against the guidelines for replying you set in your post and say that BeOS is great because it is another OS out there and it is usable for some people that want to use it. Linux is the same way as is Win32 and MacOS... usable for some but not for everybody. Competition is good for everybody. Personally I use them all on a daily basis.
I'm just replying this way because I can... even if you ask me not to. :) Honestly I could care less about influencing anyone's views on BeOS - or any other OS for that matter. I nearly included a whole list about why BeOS is great along with a list why other operating systems are great (just because I can), but instead I decided to exercise a little self control today. :)
As for being disgusted with what you are reading, if it is really that bad perhaps you should stop reading the thread... nobody is forcing you to read it.
"Reply to this however you please, even if it offends me or goes against what I think... I just might learn something from what you have to say."
--SONET
Hmm sounds pretty much like what NetPositive uses as its error message when it is unable to contact a server. :)