Here's 4 more pictures of the Twin Towers by a freind of mine who lives across the river from the financial district.
The first picture shows both towers on fire, the next shows first tower collapsing. Third picture shows one tower standing, and the last photo shows neither tower standing. Very unnerving progression.
The other side of the pond gets to share in the hype too! Let's hope that the provider stays in business longer than ricochet, has better throughput & connectivity than CDPD, and the access device is cheaper than a blackberry
With the population density of London, I would think that one or two loosely affiliated 802.11b networks would give coverage would rival any commercial offering.
They tried this and failed a while ago. Remember MCA?
The problem w/making a new standard that's integral (like a bus) is that you have to have a huge evangelical effort to get everyone on board. Peripheral manufacturers, chip makers...
It's way more difficult than trying to push a new API.
But this sounds like a quick way to saturate your link. Imagine how much content it would bring back that you would end up throwing away. And when do you check for the freshness of the cached content?
Last century, when I was in school (1997), our only choice for a constant connection to the university network was a 19.2kbps connection that came in over the phone line. A single room could only have a single connection. You ran standard phone line into a Gandalf brand 'modem' device that the dorms provided and then ran a serial cable into your machine. You configured the corresponding com port on the box as a modem, and you were done. The big problem was that it was a hardwired connection to the dialup servers (e.g. telnet connection), not an IP connection, so you had to run a SLIP client on the box you were connecting to to get an IP stack on your machine.
So, 4 rooms (8 folks) ran phone line through the hall and put all 4 connections into one linux box, and then ran 10baseT to all 4 rooms. They would get anywhere from 50-70kbps throughput, which was pretty good for an 'always-on' connection at the time.
Out of the 6 folks in the 4 rooms, 3 of them played doom/quake amongst themselves all the time (not using the uplink), the other two didn't use the connections, so the 6th guy (who put it all together) had the entire downstream bandwidth to himself.
-- indeed, I honestly wish it were developed and controlled by an open project or standards body
Yeah. That would bring it's development to a grinding halt. I'm a big fan of standards bodies for very narrowly defined items (a character set, a markup language), but when I look at CORBA, I don't think that standards bodies should be in charge of 'development products' (APIs, binaries, code...). I think standards bodies are a good thing, but standards bodies should define concepts, and leave the implementation of these concepts to others.
My ideal world is that standards bodies define the specifications, and then open source projects (with support from large corporations) build the reference implementations/compliance checkers (a la Apache, Xerces, Xalan...).
For-profit companies can build optimized / value-added implementations (e.g. websphere, IIS...) of the standards to suit a specific need.
This way:
no one company can direct the standard to their advantage
basic (yet feature complete, and standards compliant) implementations of the standards are freely available.
This gets the technology into developers hands', and can spur the grassroots development of an entire industry behind a technology. Just look at what the Java or the XML grassroots movement did for these technologies? Once developers start playing with something, all it takes is for one person to start a newsgroup / mailing list / FAQ to get the snowball started.
Job seekers back out of "agreements" all the time.
But there's a difference between a verbal "Yes I accept your offer." and "Yes, I've signed the offer letter and faxed it back to you." One is legally binding, while the other isn't.
<IANAL>
It's true that in most states employment is on an 'at-will' basis: you can be fired (or quit) at any time, for any reason, without notice. '2 weeks notice' is done out of courtesy for the employer. You really only have legal recourse if you're being fired for an 'illegal' reason (discrimination, misrepresentation of qualifications, company financial concerns), and even then you have to be able to prove it.
</IANAL>
However, a little bad press can go a long way, you would be surprised what a well written letter to the company's CEO/HR Director can gain you in situations like this. Companies are having a hard enough time recruiting qualified folks, they sure don't need a story like this floating around amongst potential candidates.
Wired == Vogue for geeks.
Business 2.0 is for folks who used used to read wired and have since gotten jobs. I nowadays I read wired and I think to myself "I just don't care."
Of course you can't read Wired or Business 2.0 because it's more ads than actual content. That's why Business 2.0 went bimonthly, you can spread more ads out over more issues, and noone notices.
The funny thing is the if you use the pretty seti@home sreensaver, you get severly degraded performance. With the screensaver it took my PIII-550 about 25 hours to chew through a block (running continuously). Just running the command line client (no pretty nothing), it chewed through 5-6 blocks per day. I easily blew away the competition and completed more blocks than 99% of the competition.
I dropped SETI@Home when I found out that they were recycling old blocks. What a waste of computing resources! My distributed.net client never runs out of good work to do.
Wonder why old books get reviewed ? Surprise, ThinkGeek just put it into their selection.
I wrote this review. I'm not affiliated with slashdot or thinkgeek in any financially-beneficial way.
I'm just a guy who read a book, liked it, and thought that other people in the slashdot community might be interested in it too. No one approached me from slashdot (this site), thinkgeek (the associated sales site) or pantheon (the book's publisher) about writing a review of the book to post on the site. All I did was send mail to Hemos saying that I'd like to write a review of Gleick's Faster. I don't get any portion of the proceeds of the sales.
I haven't seen this movie yet, but I think the premise is the same as the 'Three Amigos': movie actors are mistaken for the real thing by a third party that isn't a participant of the 'mainstream' media. Smells like a variation on a theme.
Purdue has some amazing equipment for that TNT program, but that last time I checked (I graduated Purdue CS '97) you can't get a master's out of the Technology program, so the point is moot.
Anyways, CPT (computer technology) was the CS washout program when I was there. Heh.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's 4 more pictures of the Twin Towers by a freind of mine who lives across the river from the financial district.
The first picture shows both towers on fire, the next shows first tower collapsing. Third picture shows one tower standing, and the last photo shows neither tower standing. Very unnerving progression.
With the population density of London, I would think that one or two loosely affiliated 802.11b networks would give coverage would rival any commercial offering.
You might as well call it "nova."
He's right.. there does seem to be a large market for DSL equipment on Ebay. I'm wondering how many folks got a Covad rebate and are making money.
They tried this and failed a while ago. Remember MCA?
The problem w/making a new standard that's integral (like a bus) is that you have to have a huge evangelical effort to get everyone on board. Peripheral manufacturers, chip makers...
It's way more difficult than trying to push a new API.
Two words: RACK MOUNT
But this sounds like a quick way to saturate your link. Imagine how much content it would bring back that you would end up throwing away. And when do you check for the freshness of the cached content?
Last century, when I was in school (1997), our only choice for a constant connection to the university network was a 19.2kbps connection that came in over the phone line. A single room could only have a single connection. You ran standard phone line into a Gandalf brand 'modem' device that the dorms provided and then ran a serial cable into your machine. You configured the corresponding com port on the box as a modem, and you were done. The big problem was that it was a hardwired connection to the dialup servers (e.g. telnet connection), not an IP connection, so you had to run a SLIP client on the box you were connecting to to get an IP stack on your machine.
So, 4 rooms (8 folks) ran phone line through the hall and put all 4 connections into one linux box, and then ran 10baseT to all 4 rooms. They would get anywhere from 50-70kbps throughput, which was pretty good for an 'always-on' connection at the time.
Out of the 6 folks in the 4 rooms, 3 of them played doom/quake amongst themselves all the time (not using the uplink), the other two didn't use the connections, so the 6th guy (who put it all together) had the entire downstream bandwidth to himself.
Thanks for the response. I've been thinking on this topic for a while and it seems to ring true.
My ideal world is that standards bodies define the specifications, and then open source projects (with support from large corporations) build the reference implementations/compliance checkers (a la Apache, Xerces, Xalan...). For-profit companies can build optimized / value-added implementations (e.g. websphere, IIS...) of the standards to suit a specific need. This way:
- no one company can direct the standard to their advantage
- basic (yet feature complete, and standards compliant) implementations of the standards are freely available.
This gets the technology into developers hands', and can spur the grassroots development of an entire industry behind a technology. Just look at what the Java or the XML grassroots movement did for these technologies? Once developers start playing with something, all it takes is for one person to start a newsgroup / mailing list / FAQ to get the snowball started.Job seekers back out of "agreements" all the time. But there's a difference between a verbal "Yes I accept your offer." and "Yes, I've signed the offer letter and faxed it back to you." One is legally binding, while the other isn't. <IANAL> It's true that in most states employment is on an 'at-will' basis: you can be fired (or quit) at any time, for any reason, without notice. '2 weeks notice' is done out of courtesy for the employer. You really only have legal recourse if you're being fired for an 'illegal' reason (discrimination, misrepresentation of qualifications, company financial concerns), and even then you have to be able to prove it. </IANAL> However, a little bad press can go a long way, you would be surprised what a well written letter to the company's CEO/HR Director can gain you in situations like this. Companies are having a hard enough time recruiting qualified folks, they sure don't need a story like this floating around amongst potential candidates.
Wired == Vogue for geeks.
Business 2.0 is for folks who used used to read wired and have since gotten jobs. I nowadays I read wired and I think to myself "I just don't care."
Of course you can't read Wired or Business 2.0 because it's more ads than actual content. That's why Business 2.0 went bimonthly, you can spread more ads out over more issues, and noone notices.
Not to say that it is a competition, but uhm, err. It's nice to see your name at the top of the stats...
I dropped SETI@Home when I found out that they were recycling old blocks. What a waste of computing resources! My distributed.net client never runs out of good work to do.
They were lucky, we had to write our own language to translate the linux kernel into! Uphill in the snow BOTH WAYS!
My university only had 2 T1's when I was there... sigh. I think I get better throughput now with my ADSL via SpeakEasy.
Wonder why old books get reviewed ? Surprise, ThinkGeek just put it into their selection.
I wrote this review. I'm not affiliated with slashdot or thinkgeek in any financially-beneficial way.
I'm just a guy who read a book, liked it, and thought that other people in the slashdot community might be interested in it too. No one approached me from slashdot (this site), thinkgeek (the associated sales site) or pantheon (the book's publisher) about writing a review of the book to post on the site. All I did was send mail to Hemos saying that I'd like to write a review of Gleick's Faster. I don't get any portion of the proceeds of the sales.
I haven't seen this movie yet, but I think the premise is the same as the 'Three Amigos': movie actors are mistaken for the real thing by a third party that isn't a participant of the 'mainstream' media. Smells like a variation on a theme.
Or are we going to be strictly midwestern (UofI, Purdue, CMU...) and left-coast (CalTech, Stanford, UCB...) biased?
Purdue has some amazing equipment for that TNT program, but that last time I checked (I graduated Purdue CS '97) you can't get a master's out of the Technology program, so the point is moot.
Anyways, CPT (computer technology) was the CS washout program when I was there. Heh.