Actually, a great deal of the early Usenet postings were from academic institutions, and in those days, people used their own names for the most part since it seemed reasonable and more dignified (and it didn't occur to most people to have anything else.) So a post from 1988 from "saracoombs@physics.cornell.edu" is easy to match up with a currently exisiting person who was doing graduate work at Cornell then named Sara Coombs, to make up an example. Hopefully she didn't get in flame war about cold fusion or somesuch in those days, perhaps now jeopardizing her chances for a good job or heaven forbid, elected office!
As some other posters have mentioned, many scientific displines (math,cs, and physics, e.g.) have already addressed the emphemerality of research web pages with central preprint servers with mirrors and some nice front ends for searching and contributing to www.arXiv.org. Responsible people who are interested in disseminating their research widely and in a way which is recorded submit their current work to the arXiv, usually just before sending it off to a research journal, electronic or otherwise. The archival issues of file formats and such have been well-thought out by a number of people for whom this is very important and the main preferred format is TeX, as described in this FAQ.
This is a big improvement over the previous system, where you would send of printed copies of your work to bigshots and people you thought might be interested and prevented wider distribution of preprints and results until your article was accepted and published by a journal, which with refereeing and printing backlogs, averages more than a year for most research journals in mathematics.
From the arXiv front FAQ, addressing the concerns in the article:
2.2 Why can't I just give a URL?
If derivative formats of an article are less useful than the TeX source, a URL is the least useful of all. A list of URLs is like a phone book: easy to compile, temporarily convenient, and soon unreliable. The purpose of the arXiv is to record and distribute the research literature, not merely to announce its location. (On the other hand, you are free to include extra URLs along with the genuine article.)
The Apple ][ computers used the pause between keystrokes, measured much more precisely than necessary and disregarding all but the last 8 bits, as an attempt at an analog random number seed for their psuedorandom number generator. Very simple and effective and I haven't seen many implementations of better systems around. One side effect was that if you had a program which ran off the boot disk with no keystrokes, it would do the same thing every time, no matter how improbable that was...
At the risk of getting flamed, there is a very good point to cracking down on insurance fraud.
Lots of otherwise everyday people think nothing of scamming `those huge insurance companies', yet constantly whine about having to pay exorbinant rates. In New York and New Jersey (and other states), insurance is so expensive that plenty of people who usually like to play by the rules don't carry what is required, despite potential significant legal penalties. When someone close to you is disabled by an allegedly weathly idiot driving an underisured $50k SUV and ends up being massively screwed, insurance issues become very significant and hit home much harder.
No one is suggesting that voice-stress analysis should be the final arbitrater in whether or not they decide if your claim is legit- the point is that they can hopefully sort out some suspicious claims without giving everyone the complete third-degree. If this helps them catch more scammers, more power to them. To my mind, insurance is in a state of crisis, with significant insurers pulling out of covering certain states entirely. I, for one, will happily switch to an insurance company that aggressively pursues cheaters if it means a 10% reduction in rates, and I would hope that most people would as well.
Informative note- lying to your insurance company is a fundamentally bad idea. They pay lots of lawyers to write tight contracts, so if it looks like they are facing a big payout, they will check to make sure that you really were leaving your car in the suburbs at your parent's house where it was `registered' instead of using it downtown where you'd have to pay higher insurance rates. It's not worth their trouble, apparently, for a fender-bender but when the bigger money is on the line, they will check everything.
For laptops, durability and warranty service are important considerations. For desktops, 99% of problems can be handled by swapping out and replacing with commodity hardware, so it doesn't matter nearly as much. But for laptops, those little tiny pieces of plastic that break can keep your machine from being useful at all, and waiting on the phone and for repairs can be agonizing if you are one of those people who cannot be without a computer. The problem is that it is hard to gauge durability and warranty service at purchase time, so flimsy computers with great specs look attractive but turn out to be a massive headache. Unfortunately, such computers sell well unless people know that durability and service are such an important part of a laptop.
On this front, Sony laptops are trouble, based upon my experience with several PCG-Z*** machines. Sony's service model is awful- they do not distribute parts (even the screws on the bottom that continuously fall out) to dealers, so even the most minor repair means a hassle. Specifically, it means waiting on the phone with bozos in Florida, sending it back to Sony in California, calling Texas a few dozen times to check on the status of your repair, and the end result is that you are laptop-less for weeks. It says a great deal about Sony's attitude if they think it is reasonable for someone to be without their computer for six weeks. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the tiny Vaios that are so attractive weren't so flimsy that stuff is breaking on them all the time. It got to be so bad that we would suffer through multiple failures until finally the machines became so unusable that it was worth going through their service to fix the 5 things or so that had broken.
Contrast that with Apple- they have lots of capable places where people can fix your machine while you wait (don't get me started about how amazing the Powerbook triage unit at Tekserve in Manhattan is...) and if you have to send it back, they do a great job turning things around pronto. They know that not having your computer is a big deal and do a lot to minimize the time you are without it.
I've given up on the Sonys, particularly for my graduate students, who are harder on their machines than I am. I switched from the Sonys to iBooks and have found iBooks amazingly durable and Apple's service model far superior. Since our killer aps are 'vi' and 'gcc', either platform can work fine and the iBooks have been troopers so far.
I have heard that the TiBooks are not as study as iBooks, but I don't have first-hand experience with them. I found the iBooks very good bang for the buck and will stick with them until convinced otherwise...
Currently, credit card companies and phone companies happily send info with calling and billing records to law enforcement without a warrant. This eBay policy is a naturally parallel to that and to my mind, no big deal.
Like most privacy questions, you trade convenience and/or discount for privacy. If you don't want there to be a record of your transaction, use cash in a place that charges more but which employs particularly forgetful help and doesn't have videocams. If you want the cheapest price or things delivered to you in your pajamas, expect there to be some record of your purchase.
In some cases, it is a question about long-range versus really long-range thinking and the specialization needed to get to the frontiers of research. As pointed out elsewhere, number theory is a great example. A great deal of mathematical research from the 18th century continuing up until now is focued on prime number distribution, generation and detection. For centuries, people said- What good are prime numbers? Physical measurements such as length have no difference if they are prime or not, so why worry about primes? Mathematicians responed that they were studying prime numbers for their own sake, for there are a number of intrinsically beautiful facts about primes. (In some sense, productive research mathematicians have more in common with artists than engineers.) Of course now that primality is an important tool in crypto, mathematicians who had been studying what was often thought of as the purest of the pure math are now suddenly greatly desired for the applications to encryption.
So basically that episode has saved the butts of all mathematicians. If someone asks me about the applications of my theorems, I can say that right now thery are just beautiful and interesting for their own sake, but wait around two hundred years or so, and you may see how earth-shattering my results are!
So when it comes to funding research in mathematics, some of the money goes to fields which clearly have applications, but some of it goes to fields which don't currently have applications, but seem remarkably interesting or beautiful in their own right.
It would be good if pure research were put into the "public domain", particularly when it is paid for by tax dollars.
There is an interesting NYT article today about a call for federally funded research to be more freely available, instead of in expensive and restrictive journals. It's about time- there are many expensive for-profit journals, whose worth is determined by reputations established primarily by the refereeing process. Referees are usually academics not paid by journals. Since the NSF or NIH is often paying for the researcher (who is doing the hardest work) and the universities are paying for the referees (who are doing the next hardest part of the work) and the labs and resources are usually paid for by universities (often the greatest expense) it is remarkable that the journals have been getting away with making big piles of money for essentially being clearinghouses and middlemen. In mathematics, there has been some resistance, including some from bigshots, to these journal monopolies, but change towards cheaper/free/non-profit journals has been slow. I choose to submit my research to reaonable journals on this criteria, but that means that I will never submit my work to some of the most prestigious ones. In medicine, where journals often restrict researchers from even discussing their results with colleagues or media until the article appears, this could be a massive chage. Many scientific journals do not permit you to post your own research on your web page and hopefully this overdue movement towards free distribution gathers momentum.
The main reason they check your reciept is not because they think that you may be a thief. It is because they think that their cashiers may be thieves. A standard ploy is for the cashier not to ring up expensive items for a partner. Anyone who has shopped at Fry's Electronics has noticed the "body cavity search" and the reason is that cashier A, by not ringing up a few RAM chips for their buddy customer B, could share in a pretty impressive haul. So the search is desinged to prevent this. The net effect is that Frys/Walmart/Home Depot can then afford to hire non-perfectly honest cashiers, which are much cheaper than honest cashiers, and they pass the savings on to you!
So don't be offended by the search- or shop elsewhere! People who are outraged by privacy/security issues are ok, but when people feel entitled to privacy AND deep discounts, that seems too much to me.
If indeed these tags let Walmart and other retailers manage inventory issues more economically and reduce theft, they will undoubtely catch on. For 95% of the US public, saving a few cents is worth the potential loss of privacy in a wide variety of settings. Witness those very popular "frequent buying cards" at groceries and pharmacies that allow profiling of shoppers in exchange for discounts. There hasn't been great outcry against those, and even if the hardcore privacy folks (whopping 1% of the population?) took their business elsewhere, the net effect is definitely in favor of thrift over privacy each time.
There were several species not mentioned in the article:
Out for a minute:These species are chronic abusers of the "back in five minutes" note left on their door, and seem to think that disappearing to visit the coffee shop, check their departmental mail, get a bagel, chat with colleagues, and drop something off at the grants office
can easily be accomplished during office hours. The telltale sign is that the "Back in Five Minutes" note taped to their door is
yellow with age, or graffiti'd with sarcastic comments from students...
Constant traveller:This migratory species of professor has mastered the art of travelling during the semester. `Office hours canceled whilst Professor X is in France' is a characteristic
identifying feature.
Geography 401- Office hours as a Navigational Challenge:To reach this professor, you must pass the Campus Map Reading Contest. Office hours are held in a non-descript building in the most far-flung corner of campus. To add challenge, the building is referred to not by its current name, but what it was known as during a brief period in 1972. Furthermore, the office numbers in that building are a remarkable example of discontinuous functions. For full credit, the office should be on a floor which can only be reached by a single staircase which does not connect with more than one other floor. There is normally no shortage of such maze-like buildings on campus...
Hazardous conditions:A relative of the obscure location species, this breed relies upon intimidating signs, sounds or smells to prevent students from turning up at office hours.
There are several subspecies:
Nuculear intimidation:
Impressive signs that say "Radiation hazard," and glowing hallways will cut down on student traffic, particularly among those students who hope to reproduce someday.
Impending catastrophe: Nothing kills students' desires to linger like a noisy, clunking machine in the hallway which looks like it came from a 1950s sci-fi movie. Even if they can ignore a massive clanking machine that sounds like it could explode at any moment, having to shout to be heard will tend to shorten the student's visit.
Biohazard: Students sometimes will get discouraged from finding a professor's office if they must pass by stern warning signs and through several hallways in which everyone else is
wearing masks and some kind of spacesuit-looking outfits with radcards.
Olfactory challenge: I once taught a large state university in a rural setting which had some graduate student offices near the Pig Barns. Students came to my air-conditioned office near the center of campus instead.
Bells and sirens: To reach this professor's office, there is a "Door is Alarmed" sign which must be ignored to sucessfully leave the stairwell.
Gauntlet of Sneers:This species makes sure
that the office lies past a hallway filled with grumpy graduate students themselves desparate for
the professor's time and thus willing to throw themselves in the way of any possible interlopers.
Adminstrator runaround:This twisted species become department chairs, associate deans or worse for the protection offered by having an office staff who can
ward off students from their plush, carpeted, panelled habitat.
One thing that should be kept in mind is that at many universities, teaching is a small part of a professor's duties, and research is the dominant part. And holding office hours for undergraduates is a relatively small part of teaching, so it doesn't bother me if people are minimizing that part of their time via the "early bird" strategy or
whatnot, if they are active in other parts of their obligation.
I usually hold office hours right before class for
several reasons- students are likely to be looking for me then anyway, and I can get some idea of what kinds of problems they were having difficulty with before class, if
I want to address some of those in lecture. Similarly, holding office
hours right after class is a good plan, since often students
have questions right after class and that time may as well be counted as office hours.
I have another strategy for office hours, which relies upon
the fact that
I am fortunate enough to have several offices and a lab to work near where some of our Beowulf clusters are. All of my office hours are held in my teaching office, which is windowless and tiny but in the same building as most classes. I actually work in one of my other offices which are much nicer and where the only
people who can find me are my research colleagues, my Ph.D. students and those who know where to look. This also has the advantage that my more social departmental colleagues who amble around to chit-chat and ask me to serve on committees don't find me casually either...
After typing CALL -151 to get to the monitor,
there was a built-in disassembler. To disassemble the first 20 instructions starting
at memory location $FDED (in ROM, happens to
be the character output code) type
FDEDL
A good place for short programs was on page three
of memory, so 300L was a common command...
One slight correction- I don't think that the
manuals for DOS 3.3 described how to read and write to particular sectors. If I remember, the manual
described how to read and write to binary files but did not describe how to call RWTS (read/write/track/sector) directly. There was an excellent third-party manual "Beneath Apple DOS" which had easy-to-understand documentation about a great deal of the disk opertation, including calling RWTS. I think Beneath Apple DOS included commented 6502 assembly source for DOS and it was great reading.
That old Apple II machine-language monitor was amazing and the overall simplicity and sensability of the 6502 was great. I taught myself machine language by using the mini-disassembler and puzzling out other people's code. Can you imagine doing that these days?
As someone whose memory is stilled filled with
6502 opcodes (LDA immed= $A9, RTS=$60, JSR=$20, etc.)
I wish there was still some use for that part of my brain...
An iMac with a dead CRT is not so bad- if you open the thing up, you will see a std video connector in there and can hang a monitor off of it. I remember in 1998 doing this (out of curiousity) and driving a nice 21" monitor at a reasonable resolution (playing Nanosaur...). I can't remember what res the video was able to drive the monitor at, but it was definitely more
than it could drive the internal CRT. If you want to run it headless, you may be able to hang a monitor off of it to get it set up, then disconnect it. As always, careful around the internal CRT...
According to macfixit.com, many problems are avoided by doing two things:
Using the Combined 10.2.4 update downloaded directly from Apple instead of Software Update
Running/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility afterwards to Repair Permissions using First Aid on the boot volume
Your mileage may vary, but it worked well for me and in general their advice is excellent.
Also remember that in a forum such as this, the complaining voices outnumber the ones for whom the update went smoothly just because it's pretty boring to say "Hey, it went fine for me..."
Another important consideration is the warranty service. Sony's service model is awful- they do not distribute parts (even the screws on the bottom that
continuously fall out) to dealers, so even the most minor repair means a hassle. Specifically, it means waiting on the phone with bozos in Florida, sending it back to Sony in California, calling Texas a few dozen times to check on the status of your repair, and the end result is that you are laptop-less for weeks. It says a great deal about Sony's attitude if they think it is reasonable for someone to be without their computer for six weeks. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the tiny Vaios that are so attractive weren't so flimsy that stuff is breaking on them all the time.
Contrast that with Apple- they have lots of capable places where people can fix your machine while you wait (don't get me started about how
amazing the Powerbook triage unit at Tekserve in Manhattan is...) and if you have to send it back, they do a great job turning things around pronto.
They know that not having your computer is a big deal and do a lot to minimize the time you are without it.
Apple has been making very nice laptop hardware
for a while and it's had decent Linux/Unix available
with LinuxPPC, YellowDog and Debian for a while.
Of course, now with OS X at a pretty refined stage, an order of magnitude (or two) more people are running Unix/Linux on their Powerbooks now. But there have been advocates of Powerbooks for Linux laptops on Slashdot for a while. Witness:
This Jan 2001 article about how the iBook is the was the best Linux laptop available at the time
As someone who was using and contributing to LinuxPPC on my 1997 Powerbook, it's great to see more widespread combination of excellent laptop hardware and the best available operating systems.
As has been pointed out, you pay a premium of
$500-$1000 over commodity laptops for the
privledge of not buying Windows. This
stems from the different rates MS charges
different size retailers. If you do buy a "Windows-
free" machine from a Linux laptop specialist, probably they bought
the laptops from HP or Toshiba and already
paid their $15-50 to MS anyway, so it's not like
you are keeping any money from going to MS.
If you want to make a statement by spending
an extra $500- $1000 just to not have Windows,
fine. I suggest you can make a more effective
statement by just getting the commodity laptop and giving the $500+ you save over an allegedy "Windows-free"
machine to GNU, BSD, and/or EFF, depending
upon the particular point you are trying to make.
If you truly want to avoid money going to MS, just
get an iBook ( or Powerbook if you can swing it.)
Those are great, sturdy, well-arranged machines.
Actually, I'm not sure how sturdy the Powerbooks
are but the iBooks are unbelievable and really are
made for 12-year olds as far as being tossed
in backpacks and so on.
If you live in the state of New York, there is already a statewide "Do not call" registry and you can sign up at the webpage at this link. It definitely reduced unsolicited calls for us dramatically.
The article was too brief to really understand what the thinking is, but one possible issue that they may be worried about is the following- suppose that they raise the fuel tax significantly. Portland is right on the border with Washington State, so then people there could avoid the fuel tax, as could those who drive through from California without stopping for gas in Oregon. It may be that the people with the largest burden would be those who live in the center. The GPS system would be fairer in that sense.
I have no idea what they are thinking, this was just an idea. On the East coast, where states are smaller, there definitely are issues about people going to the next state to avoid high fuel, alcohol and cigarette taxes. Out west, states are bigger, but it could still be an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, a great deal of the early Usenet postings were from academic institutions, and in those days, people used their own names for the most part since it seemed reasonable and more dignified (and it didn't occur to most people to have anything else.) So a post from 1988 from "saracoombs@physics.cornell.edu" is easy to match up with a currently exisiting person who was doing graduate work at Cornell then named Sara Coombs, to make up an example. Hopefully she didn't get in flame war about cold fusion or somesuch in those days, perhaps now jeopardizing her chances for a good job or heaven forbid, elected office!
This is a big improvement over the previous system, where you would send of printed copies of your work to bigshots and people you thought might be interested and prevented wider distribution of preprints and results until your article was accepted and published by a journal, which with refereeing and printing backlogs, averages more than a year for most research journals in mathematics.
From the arXiv front FAQ, addressing the concerns in the article:
FYI Pismo has two expansion bays also, as I type from my dual battery Pismo.
The Apple ][ computers used the pause between keystrokes, measured much more precisely than necessary and disregarding all but the last 8 bits, as an attempt at an analog random number seed for their psuedorandom number generator. Very simple and effective and I haven't seen many implementations of better systems around. One side effect was that if you had a program which ran off the boot disk with no keystrokes, it would do the same thing every time, no matter how improbable that was...
Lots of otherwise everyday people think nothing of scamming `those huge insurance companies', yet constantly whine about having to pay exorbinant rates. In New York and New Jersey (and other states), insurance is so expensive that plenty of people who usually like to play by the rules don't carry what is required, despite potential significant legal penalties. When someone close to you is disabled by an allegedly weathly idiot driving an underisured $50k SUV and ends up being massively screwed, insurance issues become very significant and hit home much harder.
No one is suggesting that voice-stress analysis should be the final arbitrater in whether or not they decide if your claim is legit- the point is that they can hopefully sort out some suspicious claims without giving everyone the complete third-degree. If this helps them catch more scammers, more power to them. To my mind, insurance is in a state of crisis, with significant insurers pulling out of covering certain states entirely. I, for one, will happily switch to an insurance company that aggressively pursues cheaters if it means a 10% reduction in rates, and I would hope that most people would as well.
Informative note- lying to your insurance company is a fundamentally bad idea. They pay lots of lawyers to write tight contracts, so if it looks like they are facing a big payout, they will check to make sure that you really were leaving your car in the suburbs at your parent's house where it was `registered' instead of using it downtown where you'd have to pay higher insurance rates. It's not worth their trouble, apparently, for a fender-bender but when the bigger money is on the line, they will check everything.
keep your machine from being useful at all, and waiting on the phone and for repairs can be agonizing if you are one of those people who cannot be without a computer. The problem is that it is hard to gauge durability and warranty service at purchase time, so flimsy computers with great specs look attractive but turn out to be a massive headache. Unfortunately, such computers sell well unless people know that durability and service are such an important part of a laptop.
On this front, Sony laptops are trouble, based upon my experience with several PCG-Z*** machines. Sony's service model is awful- they do not distribute parts (even the screws on the bottom that continuously fall out) to dealers, so even the most minor repair means a hassle. Specifically, it means waiting on the phone with bozos in Florida, sending it back to Sony in California, calling Texas a few dozen times to check on the status of your repair, and the end result is that you are laptop-less for weeks. It says a great deal about Sony's attitude if they think it is reasonable for someone to be without their computer for six weeks. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the tiny Vaios that are so attractive weren't so flimsy that stuff is breaking on them all the time. It got to be so bad that we would suffer through multiple failures until finally the machines became so unusable that it was worth going through their service to fix the 5 things or so that had broken.
Contrast that with Apple- they have lots of capable places where people can fix your machine while you wait (don't get me started about how amazing the Powerbook triage unit at Tekserve in Manhattan is...) and if you have to send it back, they do a great job turning things around pronto. They know that not having your computer is a big deal and do a lot to minimize the time you are without it.
I've given up on the Sonys, particularly for my graduate students, who are harder on their machines than I am. I switched from the Sonys to iBooks and have found iBooks amazingly durable and Apple's service model far superior.
Since our killer aps are 'vi' and 'gcc', either platform can work fine and the iBooks have been troopers so far.
I have heard that the TiBooks are not as study as iBooks, but I don't have first-hand experience with them. I found the iBooks very good bang for the buck and will stick with them until convinced otherwise...
Currently, credit card companies and phone companies happily send info with calling and billing records to law enforcement without a warrant. This eBay policy is a naturally parallel to that and to my mind, no big deal.
Like most privacy questions, you trade convenience and/or discount for privacy. If you don't want there to be a record of your transaction, use cash in a place that charges more but which employs particularly forgetful help and doesn't have videocams. If you want the cheapest price or things delivered to you in your pajamas, expect there to be some record of your purchase.
So basically that episode has saved the butts of all mathematicians. If someone asks me about the applications of my theorems, I can say that right now thery are just beautiful and interesting for their own sake, but wait around two hundred years or so, and you may see how earth-shattering my results are!
So when it comes to funding research in mathematics, some of the money goes to fields which clearly have applications, but some of it goes to fields which don't currently have applications, but seem remarkably interesting or beautiful in their own right.
It would be good if pure research were put into the "public domain", particularly when it is paid for by tax dollars.
There is an interesting NYT article today about a call for federally funded research to be more freely available, instead of in expensive and restrictive journals. It's about time- there are many expensive for-profit journals, whose worth is determined by reputations established primarily by the refereeing process. Referees are usually academics not paid by journals. Since the NSF or NIH is often paying for the researcher (who is doing the hardest work) and the universities are paying for the referees (who are doing the next hardest part of the work) and the labs and resources are usually paid for by universities (often the greatest expense) it is remarkable that the
journals have been getting away with making big piles of money for essentially being clearinghouses and middlemen. In mathematics, there has been some resistance, including some from bigshots, to these journal monopolies, but change towards cheaper/free/non-profit journals has been slow. I choose to submit my research to reaonable journals on this criteria, but that means that I will never submit my work to some of the most prestigious ones. In medicine, where journals often restrict researchers from even discussing their results with colleagues or media until the article appears, this could be a massive chage. Many scientific journals do not permit you to post your own research on your web page and hopefully this overdue movement towards free distribution gathers momentum.
So don't be offended by the search- or shop elsewhere! People who are outraged by privacy/security issues are ok, but when people feel entitled to privacy AND deep discounts, that seems too much to me.
If indeed these tags let Walmart and other retailers manage inventory issues more economically and reduce theft, they will undoubtely catch on. For 95% of the US public, saving a few cents is worth the potential loss of privacy in a wide variety of settings. Witness those very popular "frequent buying cards" at groceries and pharmacies that allow profiling of shoppers in exchange for discounts. There hasn't been great outcry against those, and even if the hardcore privacy folks (whopping 1% of the population?) took their business elsewhere, the net effect is definitely in favor of thrift over privacy each time.
Out for a minute:These species are chronic abusers of the "back in five minutes" note left on their door, and seem to think that disappearing to visit the coffee shop, check their departmental mail, get a bagel, chat with colleagues, and drop something off at the grants office can easily be accomplished during office hours. The telltale sign is that the "Back in Five Minutes" note taped to their door is yellow with age, or graffiti'd with sarcastic comments from students...
Constant traveller:This migratory species of professor has mastered the art of travelling during the semester. `Office hours canceled whilst Professor X is in France' is a characteristic identifying feature.
Geography 401- Office hours as a Navigational Challenge:To reach this professor, you must pass the Campus Map Reading Contest. Office hours are held in a non-descript building in the most far-flung corner of campus. To add challenge, the building is referred to not by its current name, but what it was known as during a brief period in 1972. Furthermore, the office numbers in that building are a remarkable example of discontinuous functions. For full credit, the office should be on a floor which can only be reached by a single staircase which does not connect with more than one other floor. There is normally no shortage of such maze-like buildings on campus...
Hazardous conditions:A relative of the obscure location species, this breed relies upon intimidating signs, sounds or smells to prevent students from turning up at office hours. There are several subspecies:
- Nuculear intimidation:
Impressive signs that say "Radiation hazard," and glowing hallways will cut down on student traffic, particularly among those students who hope to reproduce someday.
- Impending catastrophe: Nothing kills students' desires to linger like a noisy, clunking machine in the hallway which looks like it came from a 1950s sci-fi movie. Even if they can ignore a massive clanking machine that sounds like it could explode at any moment, having to shout to be heard will tend to shorten the student's visit.
- Biohazard: Students sometimes will get discouraged from finding a professor's office if they must pass by stern warning signs and through several hallways in which everyone else is
wearing masks and some kind of spacesuit-looking outfits with radcards.
- Olfactory challenge: I once taught a large state university in a rural setting which had some graduate student offices near the Pig Barns. Students came to my air-conditioned office near the center of campus instead.
- Bells and sirens: To reach this professor's office, there is a "Door is Alarmed" sign which must be ignored to sucessfully leave the stairwell.
Gauntlet of Sneers:This species makes sure that the office lies past a hallway filled with grumpy graduate students themselves desparate for the professor's time and thus willing to throw themselves in the way of any possible interlopers.Adminstrator runaround:This twisted species become department chairs, associate deans or worse for the protection offered by having an office staff who can ward off students from their plush, carpeted, panelled habitat.
I usually hold office hours right before class for several reasons- students are likely to be looking for me then anyway, and I can get some idea of what kinds of problems they were having difficulty with before class, if I want to address some of those in lecture. Similarly, holding office hours right after class is a good plan, since often students have questions right after class and that time may as well be counted as office hours.
I have another strategy for office hours, which relies upon the fact that I am fortunate enough to have several offices and a lab to work near where some of our Beowulf clusters are. All of my office hours are held in my teaching office, which is windowless and tiny but in the same building as most classes. I actually work in one of my other offices which are much nicer and where the only people who can find me are my research colleagues, my Ph.D. students and those who know where to look. This also has the advantage that my more social departmental colleagues who amble around to chit-chat and ask me to serve on committees don't find me casually either...
After typing CALL -151 to get to the monitor, there was a built-in disassembler. To disassemble the first 20 instructions starting at memory location $FDED (in ROM, happens to be the character output code) type FDEDL A good place for short programs was on page three of memory, so 300L was a common command...
Hey, with my nick, I was obligated to respond!
One slight correction- I don't think that the manuals for DOS 3.3 described how to read and write to particular sectors. If I remember, the manual described how to read and write to binary files but did not describe how to call RWTS (read/write/track/sector) directly. There was an excellent third-party manual "Beneath Apple DOS" which had easy-to-understand documentation about a great deal of the disk opertation, including calling RWTS. I think Beneath Apple DOS included commented 6502 assembly source for DOS and it was great reading.
That old Apple II machine-language monitor was
amazing and the overall simplicity and sensability
of the 6502 was great. I taught myself machine
language by using the mini-disassembler and
puzzling out other people's code. Can you imagine
doing that these days?
As someone whose memory is stilled filled with 6502 opcodes (LDA immed= $A9, RTS=$60, JSR=$20, etc.) I wish there was still some use for that part of my brain...
An iMac with a dead CRT is not so bad- if you open the thing up, you will see a std video connector in there and can hang a monitor off of it. I remember in 1998 doing this (out of curiousity) and driving a nice 21" monitor at a reasonable resolution (playing Nanosaur...). I can't remember what res the video was able to drive the monitor at, but it was definitely more than it could drive the internal CRT. If you want to run it headless, you may be able to hang a monitor off of it to get it set up, then disconnect it. As always, careful around the internal CRT...
- Using the Combined 10.2.4 update downloaded directly from Apple instead of Software Update
- Running
/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility afterwards to Repair Permissions using First Aid on the boot volume
Your mileage may vary, but it worked well for me and in general their advice is excellent.Also remember that in a forum such as this, the complaining voices outnumber the ones for whom the update went smoothly just because it's pretty boring to say "Hey, it went fine for me..."
Contrast that with Apple- they have lots of capable places where people can fix your machine while you wait (don't get me started about how amazing the Powerbook triage unit at Tekserve in Manhattan is...) and if you have to send it back, they do a great job turning things around pronto. They know that not having your computer is a big deal and do a lot to minimize the time you are without it.
- This Jan 2001 article about how the iBook is the was the best Linux laptop available at the time
- This April 1999 article in which Taco lusts after the G3 Powerbook Lombard with LinuxPPC
- In this July 2002 discussion of a Linux on laptops scorecard many (though not half) mention how appropriate Apple's offerings are.
As someone who was using and contributing to LinuxPPC on my 1997 Powerbook, it's great to see more widespread combination of excellent laptop hardware and the best available operating systems.If you want to make a statement by spending an extra $500- $1000 just to not have Windows, fine. I suggest you can make a more effective statement by just getting the commodity laptop and giving the $500+ you save over an allegedy "Windows-free" machine to GNU, BSD, and/or EFF, depending upon the particular point you are trying to make.
If you truly want to avoid money going to MS, just get an iBook ( or Powerbook if you can swing it.) Those are great, sturdy, well-arranged machines. Actually, I'm not sure how sturdy the Powerbooks are but the iBooks are unbelievable and really are made for 12-year olds as far as being tossed in backpacks and so on.
If you live in the state of New York, there is already a statewide "Do not call" registry and you can sign up at the webpage at this link. It definitely reduced unsolicited calls for us dramatically.
I have no idea what they are thinking, this was just an idea. On the East coast, where states are smaller, there definitely are issues about people going to the next state to avoid high fuel, alcohol and cigarette taxes. Out west, states are bigger, but it could still be an issue.