Why settle for an HF radio that's merely computer-controlled when you can make the computer the radio. Gerald Youngblood's SDR-1000 is a full-blown Software Defined Radio (SDR) that blows away most ham rigs. The demo Gerald did at Dayton was very impressive. The best part is that if you want your radio to have a new feature, all you have to do is write the code to do it...
I was gonna say...at Purdue we have a fine EE program for the thinkers, and for the guys who don't make the cut we have a more hands-on EET (EE Technology) Major. Same with MET, ECE... basically every engineering discipline. Why not just let the smart ones go on and let the not-so-quick take the hands-on route?
As a Purdue EE grad who had a lot of friends in the EET program, let me tell you: those EET guys learn a lot more theory and have to think a lot more than you'd guess... EET at Purdue is a tough program and more than just for those who don't make the "EE cut." And interestingly enough, some of the better "engineers" I've known in industry have been "technologists." (i.e. those with 4-year Technology degrees.)
When I was at Purdue, I think we had a pretty good mix of hands-on and theoretical. Perhaps we got a little more hands-on than other schools? I don't know...
IMHO, I don't think what EE students need is hands-on experience, per se.. They need more practice in intuitively understanding their chosen field... This may require hands-on or just spending more time doing simulations on a computer. The point is, a lot of engineers (even some brilliant ones) go though school not understanding what their designing; they can make the formulas work but they don't have a clue what makes their circuits tick or how to relate them to other systems.
I had a few lab partners in upper level classes who could not believe I could just grab a few parts to whip up something like an emitter-follower amplifier. (Really basic stuff..) I had the circuit built and working by the time they were just finishing the calculations to figure out what size resistors to use. Other times it would take them more than 5 seconds to figure out what a 20 dB change in magnitude represented. Out would come the pencil and paper again... It's hard to have great insight into difficult problems when you have to trudge through the fundamentals all the time....
Perhaps those who don't "get the intuition" by the time they are a senior in EE never really do... Is it something that can be taught or learned by rote?
So if the computon is modeled after electric power delivery, will there be such measurements as real, reactive, and apparent computational load? Just a smart-ass question from an electrical engineer...
Railroads are one of the few types of entities that aren't telcos that are likely to have continuous strips of land between metro/suburban areas.
Sell it to them as a cutting edge experiment: publicity, and maybe even a fledgling version of being able to offer passengers internet access, or internet-tracked cargo shipping, or something else.
Many railroads have been there, done that, and gotten many t-shirts in this area. Railroads (along with other ciritical infrastructure companies like utilities and pipelines) have been operating private microwave radio systems for 40 years. Nowadays many of the lightly-loaded routes operate on (non-802.11) unlicensed 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz equipment. One of the major functions of these networks is to support Automatic Equipment Identification (AEI) which allows railroads to track any piece of rolling stock anywhere in North America.
It really doesn't surprise me that X11 will be made to work on IPv6 since X was originally designed to run across a variety of network types. Am I the only one here that remembers that X ran over DECnet? IIRC there may have been an OSI implementation as well...
Finally, I was very bumbed that Agilent didn't get to keep the HP name. The HP way is still alive over there. HP should have lost the right to have the name of two wonderful engineers in their name when they spun Agilent off. Talk about dumping the date that brought you to the dance!
Amen brother... The real HP is over at Agilent. Unfortunately, the H-P name became associated with computers and printers by consumers and IT folks... So the brand's marketing value became more important than what it stood for. After all Agilent sells stuff in niche markets that relatively few people buy (compared to computers at least...) And with their reputation in their markets, Agilent didn't need to keep the H-P name to keep some semblance of credibility...
IMHO, the calculator division should have gone to Agilent... After all, a much larger percetage of their products are sold the engineers, scientists, technicians, etc. than the "new" H-P. It seems that a large part of the target market for H-P calculators is Agilent's customer base.
--zawada
(BTW I still use the H-P 11C I bought in high school nearly 20 years ago)
Lets get some facts correct. In most of the US, you are an engineer if you study engineering in college, be it electrical, mechanical, etc. To manage projects in civil engineering you have to be a licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.). That means you have several years of experience, have passed thorough testing, and have references from established P.E.s that say you are not only qualified technically, but ethically, to recieve the title.
This is not correct. Check your state's engineering laws. Most, if not all, states regulate the use of the title "Engineer," and it usually requires a lot more than merely holding an engineering degree. PEs aren't limited to Civil Engineering work. That's why there are separate exams for mechanical, electrical, nuclear, civil, etc., etc. Furthermore, PEs are required by law and ethics to stay within their areas of expertise. So a Civil PE stamping electrical plans is a no-no.
Try getting electrical plans that aren't stamped by a PE approved for a permit and see how far your BSEE will get you. Many states require permitting agencies to accept only PE-stamped plans.
Texas, unlike the rest of the US, says that the title Engineer is the equivalent of the P.E., which it is not. This is an error on the part of lawmakers in Texas, who should act to bring their definition of Engineer into line with the rest of the country.
This is not correct... What differentiates Texas from most states is their enforcement of their engineering statutes. (Pennsylvania is pretty aggressive too.) In most states it is illegal to call oneself "engineer" in public circles without a PE license. Most states' "industry exemptions" are pretty broad though and most folks won't get busted for having the title "engineer" on their business card. Most states only go after folks who are actively trying to sell engineering services to the public, not "software engineers" or "tech support engineers."
Since I have a degree, which I earned, that includes the title Engineer, I find it offensive that Texas would refuse me the right to use that title. Requiring a P.E. for some activities is perfectly understandable, but there are many Engineers who do not have a P.E., who still deserve to be able to use the title they earned.
What makes the issue difficult is determining when one is no longer considered an engineer for internal purposes and starts offering engineering services to the public. Take TI as an example, if they have people who design chips, subsytems, etc for manufacture, it's pretty clear that they aren't offering engineering services to the public. However, what about "applications engineers?" If they provide designs using TI components to customers, are these engineers are offering a service to the public? Texas is going to the extreme in preventing the slipperly slope syndrome. IMHO, In the "internal case" Texas should apply an "industry exemption" and leave the engineers alone... In the latter case, those guys should be regulated as PEs since they are selling designs (in exchange for chip business)...
And for those folks that say "hey, that electrical PE exam is for things liker power and big motors...", look again. NCEES, the folks who prepare the Fundamentals of Engineering and Principles and Practice Exams, have recently revised the EE exam to indlude a depth section on computers and software engineering for folks who work in computer-related fields. IMHO, any person worth his/her salt who wants to be called a "Software Engineer" should be able to pass that exam.
Looking back now, it seems to me that the Osborne books were the logical O'Reilly Associates of that era. I was particularly fond of "Introduction to Microprocessors" and their various assembly language introductions. My copies were majorly dogeared. The only one I hung onto was my 6502 Assembly Language Programming by Lance Leventhal.
I'm surprised that Osborne's publishing venture with McGraw-Hill has received such little attention in this slashdot topic. He published a lot of books that got many an aspiring geek started in the early eighties. I learned assembly with the 6809 vesrion of the Leventhal book. I never really got the hang of assembly before Leventhal, after that it all made sense. A lot of the books Osborne published were that way... He seemed to publish books that were very practical and helped the reader understand the topic at a fundamental level. Typically the Osborne books served as invaluable references long after the reader had mastered the topic. I still own my Leventhal book too. It represents a huge turning point in my understanding of computers... Many folks will remember him for the luggable computers but, IMHO, his real contribution to computing was his publishing.
The funniest thing I remember about being at NCSA at the time Mosaic was released is that I seem to recall Larry Smarr referring to Mosaic as "the next NCSA Telnet."
At the time, NCSA Telnet had been the Center's big contribution to the Internet and a huge one at that. In the mid-'80s before NCSA Telnet, no one had dreamed of using a PC or Mac to directly access resources (like supercomputers) on the 'Net... It just wasn't done. MIT's PC/IP came out about the same time but I don't think it saw nearly same distribution as NCSA Telnet in the early years... NCSA Telnet was the client almost everyone used on "little machines."
Now ten years later, how many folks know what NCSA Telnet was, let alone recall it's impact? Talk about differences in scale...
Are they going to distribute Contiki on cassette tape? (Unfortunately my subscription to Cursor magazine lapsed years ago.)
I'm dying to dig my old Commodore PET out of the basement to get Contiki up and running, though I haven't the foggiest idea how I'm going to to get usable code off of the net and onto a CBM disk. Anyone know where the latest verion of gcc for the PET is located?:-)
I agree... First SCO arms themselves with a lawyer with a not-so-stellar track record (at least when it comes to recent, high-profile cases) and then they go after the company that would arguably have the largest warchest available. I read these articles and said to myself, 'These guys certainly have a death wish...'
The problem with security in ad hoc mesh networks built in a cooperative environment* is that you have to worry about who's running the intermediate nodes and whether or not they're doing anything bad with your traffic. Even if you design the wireless link so that non-participants can't sniff your traffic out of the air, the mesh nodes themselves must be secure so that their owners can't snoop on each other. So in the mesh environment, you'll either need to require security to be end-to-end or design a radio that switches packets at a low level and doesn't let traffic passing through to be copied higher into the node OS where it can be snooped. I would opt for the end-to-end security since I can't be sure someone hasn't built a radio that violated a privacy standard.
--zawada
(*) By cooperative environment, I'm talking about mesh networks that are built by many independent entities, with each node carrying the traffic of multiple participants. e.g., your laptop participates in a cloud of laptops that ultimately carries all participants' Internet traffic back to an access point somewhere.
If you're asking that in the context of the story, that is in relation to getting hired for a job...
That's the interesting thing about this situation. The guy *already has* the job. We're not even talking about a hurdle to get into the door... The author of the post stated that the policy was instituted about a year ago and covers all *existing* employees. Sounds more like the company is trying to keep tabs on its employees to identify those who may be thinking about lining their own pockets with company assets. Not the sort of trust relationship I'd want with my employer...
--zawada
Re:Not Lucky, Forchini
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 1
There's lots of irony here... When Bob Lucky *was* at Bell Labs (pre-divestitue AT&T), his big claim to fame was the invention of the adaptive equalizer. One of the big applications of which is echo cancellation. That's right: his work led to a device used to eliminate multipath. That's probably why he is quoted in the article as being familliar with the technology. Furthermore, Lucky's bi-monthy column in IEEE spectrum is called "Reflections."
--zawada
PS, For those who aren't aware, Bob Lucky started his career at Bell Labs way before the big breakup of AT&T. When AT&T was broken up, a bunch of Bell Labs people (including Lucky) moved over to the newly-created Bellcore to support the RBOCs... When the RBOCs sold Bellcore to SAIC, Bellcore's name was changed to Telecordia so that "Bell" would no longer be a part of it.
Believe it or not, a few states regulate this or at least they used to... When I was growing up in Indiana, my father had a "Television and Radio Servicing" license for a number of years. I think Indiana finally succumbed to common sense a couple of years ago and no longer requires a license to fix TVs.
Audits from the IRS go back 7 years. If I have a new computer in 7 years I won't be able to reprint this years return. So much for the "store my tax info on CD". I'm stuck with Paper as my only record keeping. That removes one of the benefits of using a computer program in the first place.
Ummm.. You're a little bit off on this. The IRS can only go back three years and audit you. That is unless they suspect you of comitting fraud, then they can go back as far as they damn well please. You're better off keeping copies of your returns indefinitely. The Motley Fool has a nice guide on how long to keep stuff.
Personally, I'd keep both the paper and electronic media.
However, the Airgen specs say it has sealed (sic) lead-acid batteries as well. (Though I can't figure out what for...) So are these batteries somehow less evil than the ones in an APC UPS?
I'd also like to know how much oxygen this thing will suck up. Will this thing asphyxiate itself (and the people) in a well-sealed room/building?
--zawada
The author of the article is waxing nostalgic about a day that never existed. Back in the NSFNET days (not the earliest days of the Internet but precommercialed nonetheless), if the NSS your regional network was connected to had problems, you would have had certainly felt it. Regional networks connected large swaths (several states) of the US to the Internet much like the author describes what is going on today. Eventually some regionals became multi-homed, but even then many were not designed to properly handle all traffic failing over to a single link to the backbone. I didn't start using the ARPAnet until it's final days, but even then I suspect the loss of a core site would isolate a number of leaf nodes.
The design of TCP/IP allows for redundancy and survivability, however most if not all of the research backbones that evolved into the commercialized Internet never had a great deal of redundancy. Granted, later incarnations like the NSFNET T3 network were better, but most had single points of failure which could be felt across large parts of the Internet when those points had problems...
Well... I *am* a Gen-X person (born in '69) and I agree with everything wowbagger said. I didn't go to Padre either but I did have a credit card (and a PT job to go along with it)in college... But I used my CC sparingly and absolutely *never* carried a balance, just as my parents taught me. If I didn't have the money in my checking account, I did without the ticket to the concert or skipped the trip to Florida.
And $50,000 in college loans to become "an art therapist and professional harpist"?!?! What the fsck is up with that? My undergrad and graduate degrees together were much cheaper than that. (I went to Purdue as an in-state undergrad and DePaul, a private school, for my Masters.) Perhaps you shouldn't be going to that exclusive private college if it's not within your price range and you have no hope in quickly recouping you educational investment...
The biggest problem with Gen-X is the large number of our generation that took on huge amounts of debt without managing it properly. Yes, there are times when debt is good, but when you get to the point of "dreading the day we actually have to start paying," you're way over your head. If you managed debt properly, you don't mind paying it back because you have the money to do so. This is not a generation-base phenomina - unless the Gen-Y/Millenial (sp?) generation learns from our mistakes, they'll be in the same boat...
As an (un)interesting side note, undelete was done two different ways at Purdue until the mid '90s. The entomb system was written by the Computing Center folks IIRC. Over at the Engineering Computer Network (ECN), we had/zap. Any file you removed with rm was copied to the/zap/login (where login was the user's login) directory before complete removal. Every night a cron job would clean everything out of/zap that was more than 24 hours old. Unfortunately/zap wasn't as advanced as entomb and fat-fingered cp and mv mistakes were not recoverable. The folks at ECN (ghg, davy, jrs, et al) had only modified rm but they did not create a comprehensive library to link against. I believe ECN switched from/zap to entomb when they moved from SunOS to Solaris. One thing I can't recall was whether entomb could help you recover from using > instead of >>... (That was one I dealt with a lot as a site consultant...) Does anyone remember?
Here's the Google cache of the site map to salivate over...
American Tower Corp. (ATC) is in the business of buying/building towers so they can lease them to the wireless telecom and broadcast industries. (Many times they end up leasing them back to the folks they bought them from...) The map in the aforementioned link is a map of ALL of ATC's sites, which number somewhere around 14,000... The majority of the towers depicted on that map are NOT the ex-AT&T sites, rather those that ATC built themselves or obtained from other organizations. The non-AT&T towers are ATC's bread-and-butter and subsequently not for sale.
When American Tower bought the sites from AT&T a few years ago, the number of AT&T sites was only about 2,700 IIRC. Of the 2,700, ATC kept the best sites for their purposes and put 1000-1500 for sale. Since the ex-AT&T sites have been for sale for a couple of years now, they've been pretty well picked over and the best locations are long gone... So in other words: the above map shows almost two orders of magnitude more towers than what's for sale... don't get your hopes up.
In the US, power distribution for residential and light commercial/industrial service is performed with grounded-wye three-phase circuits, with the most common voltage being a nominal 12 kV, phase-to-phase. That means the transformer in your backyard, fed with one of those three phases, sees a primary voltage of about 7 kV. In rural areas, where distribution circuits tend to be much longer, 34.5 kV distribution voltages are used. (The corresponding phase-to-neutral voltage in that case is about 20 kV.)
In US commercial and industrial settings, three phase power is used, so while the familiar 120 V line-to-neutral voltage is present, line-to-line (phase-to-phase) voltage is 208 V. 240 V is not common in an industrial or commercial building. Larger buildings are fed 480/277 V by the power company. This in turn is stepped down to 208/120 V with "dry type" transformers distributed throughout the building... Also, 277 V lighting is common in large buildings...
As for arcing between power and phone lines on a pole, this doesn't happen because there is a *lot* of distance between the power primary and the phone lines... Much more distance than say between the (bare) phase conductor(s) and the neutral. IIRC the "comms space" on a pole starts 18" below the neutral.
Slashdot Mirror
Why settle for an HF radio that's merely computer-controlled when you can make the computer the radio. Gerald Youngblood's SDR-1000 is a full-blown Software Defined Radio (SDR) that blows away most ham rigs. The demo Gerald did at Dayton was very impressive. The best part is that if you want your radio to have a new feature, all you have to do is write the code to do it...
--zawada
As a Purdue EE grad who had a lot of friends in the EET program, let me tell you: those EET guys learn a lot more theory and have to think a lot more than you'd guess... EET at Purdue is a tough program and more than just for those who don't make the "EE cut." And interestingly enough, some of the better "engineers" I've known in industry have been "technologists." (i.e. those with 4-year Technology degrees.)
When I was at Purdue, I think we had a pretty good mix of hands-on and theoretical. Perhaps we got a little more hands-on than other schools? I don't know...
IMHO, I don't think what EE students need is hands-on experience, per se.. They need more practice in intuitively understanding their chosen field... This may require hands-on or just spending more time doing simulations on a computer. The point is, a lot of engineers (even some brilliant ones) go though school not understanding what their designing; they can make the formulas work but they don't have a clue what makes their circuits tick or how to relate them to other systems.
I had a few lab partners in upper level classes who could not believe I could just grab a few parts to whip up something like an emitter-follower amplifier. (Really basic stuff..) I had the circuit built and working by the time they were just finishing the calculations to figure out what size resistors to use. Other times it would take them more than 5 seconds to figure out what a 20 dB change in magnitude represented. Out would come the pencil and paper again... It's hard to have great insight into difficult problems when you have to trudge through the fundamentals all the time....
Perhaps those who don't "get the intuition" by the time they are a senior in EE never really do... Is it something that can be taught or learned by rote?
--zawada
So if the computon is modeled after electric power delivery, will there be such measurements as real, reactive, and apparent computational load? Just a smart-ass question from an electrical engineer...
--zawada
No, you got it right the first time...
Sell it to them as a cutting edge experiment: publicity, and maybe even a fledgling version of being able to offer passengers internet access, or internet-tracked cargo shipping, or something else.
Many railroads have been there, done that, and gotten many t-shirts in this area. Railroads (along with other ciritical infrastructure companies like utilities and pipelines) have been operating private microwave radio systems for 40 years. Nowadays many of the lightly-loaded routes operate on (non-802.11) unlicensed 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz equipment. One of the major functions of these networks is to support Automatic Equipment Identification (AEI) which allows railroads to track any piece of rolling stock anywhere in North America.
--zawada
The proper name for this technology is "IP over Avian Carriers" and it is defined in RFC 1149.
--zawada
It really doesn't surprise me that X11 will be made to work on IPv6 since X was originally designed to run across a variety of network types. Am I the only one here that remembers that X ran over DECnet? IIRC there may have been an OSI implementation as well...
--zawada
Amen brother... The real HP is over at Agilent. Unfortunately, the H-P name became associated with computers and printers by consumers and IT folks... So the brand's marketing value became more important than what it stood for. After all Agilent sells stuff in niche markets that relatively few people buy (compared to computers at least...) And with their reputation in their markets, Agilent didn't need to keep the H-P name to keep some semblance of credibility...
IMHO, the calculator division should have gone to Agilent... After all, a much larger percetage of their products are sold the engineers, scientists, technicians, etc. than the "new" H-P. It seems that a large part of the target market for H-P calculators is Agilent's customer base.
--zawada
(BTW I still use the H-P 11C I bought in high school nearly 20 years ago)
This is not correct. Check your state's engineering laws. Most, if not all, states regulate the use of the title "Engineer," and it usually requires a lot more than merely holding an engineering degree. PEs aren't limited to Civil Engineering work. That's why there are separate exams for mechanical, electrical, nuclear, civil, etc., etc. Furthermore, PEs are required by law and ethics to stay within their areas of expertise. So a Civil PE stamping electrical plans is a no-no.
Try getting electrical plans that aren't stamped by a PE approved for a permit and see how far your BSEE will get you. Many states require permitting agencies to accept only PE-stamped plans.
Texas, unlike the rest of the US, says that the title Engineer is the equivalent of the P.E., which it is not. This is an error on the part of lawmakers in Texas, who should act to bring their definition of Engineer into line with the rest of the country.
This is not correct... What differentiates Texas from most states is their enforcement of their engineering statutes. (Pennsylvania is pretty aggressive too.) In most states it is illegal to call oneself "engineer" in public circles without a PE license. Most states' "industry exemptions" are pretty broad though and most folks won't get busted for having the title "engineer" on their business card. Most states only go after folks who are actively trying to sell engineering services to the public, not "software engineers" or "tech support engineers."
Since I have a degree, which I earned, that includes the title Engineer, I find it offensive that Texas would refuse me the right to use that title. Requiring a P.E. for some activities is perfectly understandable, but there are many Engineers who do not have a P.E., who still deserve to be able to use the title they earned.
What makes the issue difficult is determining when one is no longer considered an engineer for internal purposes and starts offering engineering services to the public. Take TI as an example, if they have people who design chips, subsytems, etc for manufacture, it's pretty clear that they aren't offering engineering services to the public. However, what about "applications engineers?" If they provide designs using TI components to customers, are these engineers are offering a service to the public? Texas is going to the extreme in preventing the slipperly slope syndrome. IMHO, In the "internal case" Texas should apply an "industry exemption" and leave the engineers alone... In the latter case, those guys should be regulated as PEs since they are selling designs (in exchange for chip business)...
And for those folks that say "hey, that electrical PE exam is for things liker power and big motors...", look again. NCEES, the folks who prepare the Fundamentals of Engineering and Principles and Practice Exams, have recently revised the EE exam to indlude a depth section on computers and software engineering for folks who work in computer-related fields. IMHO, any person worth his/her salt who wants to be called a "Software Engineer" should be able to pass that exam.
--zawada
(licensed PE in four states)
I'm surprised that Osborne's publishing venture with McGraw-Hill has received such little attention in this slashdot topic. He published a lot of books that got many an aspiring geek started in the early eighties. I learned assembly with the 6809 vesrion of the Leventhal book. I never really got the hang of assembly before Leventhal, after that it all made sense. A lot of the books Osborne published were that way... He seemed to publish books that were very practical and helped the reader understand the topic at a fundamental level. Typically the Osborne books served as invaluable references long after the reader had mastered the topic. I still own my Leventhal book too. It represents a huge turning point in my understanding of computers... Many folks will remember him for the luggable computers but, IMHO, his real contribution to computing was his publishing.
--zawada
At the time, NCSA Telnet had been the Center's big contribution to the Internet and a huge one at that. In the mid-'80s before NCSA Telnet, no one had dreamed of using a PC or Mac to directly access resources (like supercomputers) on the 'Net... It just wasn't done. MIT's PC/IP came out about the same time but I don't think it saw nearly same distribution as NCSA Telnet in the early years... NCSA Telnet was the client almost everyone used on "little machines."
Now ten years later, how many folks know what NCSA Telnet was, let alone recall it's impact? Talk about differences in scale...
--zawada
I'm dying to dig my old Commodore PET out of the basement to get Contiki up and running, though I haven't the foggiest idea how I'm going to to get usable code off of the net and onto a CBM disk. Anyone know where the latest verion of gcc for the PET is located? :-)
--zawada
I agree... First SCO arms themselves with a lawyer with a not-so-stellar track record (at least when it comes to recent, high-profile cases) and then they go after the company that would arguably have the largest warchest available. I read these articles and said to myself, 'These guys certainly have a death wish...'
--zawada
--zawada
(*) By cooperative environment, I'm talking about mesh networks that are built by many independent entities, with each node carrying the traffic of multiple participants. e.g., your laptop participates in a cloud of laptops that ultimately carries all participants' Internet traffic back to an access point somewhere.
That's the interesting thing about this situation. The guy *already has* the job. We're not even talking about a hurdle to get into the door... The author of the post stated that the policy was instituted about a year ago and covers all *existing* employees. Sounds more like the company is trying to keep tabs on its employees to identify those who may be thinking about lining their own pockets with company assets. Not the sort of trust relationship I'd want with my employer...
--zawada
--zawada
PS, For those who aren't aware, Bob Lucky started his career at Bell Labs way before the big breakup of AT&T. When AT&T was broken up, a bunch of Bell Labs people (including Lucky) moved over to the newly-created Bellcore to support the RBOCs... When the RBOCs sold Bellcore to SAIC, Bellcore's name was changed to Telecordia so that "Bell" would no longer be a part of it.
Believe it or not, a few states regulate this or at least they used to... When I was growing up in Indiana, my father had a "Television and Radio Servicing" license for a number of years. I think Indiana finally succumbed to common sense a couple of years ago and no longer requires a license to fix TVs.
--zawada
Ummm.. You're a little bit off on this. The IRS can only go back three years and audit you. That is unless they suspect you of comitting fraud, then they can go back as far as they damn well please. You're better off keeping copies of your returns indefinitely. The Motley Fool has a nice guide on how long to keep stuff.
Personally, I'd keep both the paper and electronic media.
--zawada
I'd also like to know how much oxygen this thing will suck up. Will this thing asphyxiate itself (and the people) in a well-sealed room/building?
--zawada
The design of TCP/IP allows for redundancy and survivability, however most if not all of the research backbones that evolved into the commercialized Internet never had a great deal of redundancy. Granted, later incarnations like the NSFNET T3 network were better, but most had single points of failure which could be felt across large parts of the Internet when those points had problems...
--zawada
And $50,000 in college loans to become "an art therapist and professional harpist"?!?! What the fsck is up with that? My undergrad and graduate degrees together were much cheaper than that. (I went to Purdue as an in-state undergrad and DePaul, a private school, for my Masters.) Perhaps you shouldn't be going to that exclusive private college if it's not within your price range and you have no hope in quickly recouping you educational investment...
The biggest problem with Gen-X is the large number of our generation that took on huge amounts of debt without managing it properly. Yes, there are times when debt is good, but when you get to the point of "dreading the day we actually have to start paying," you're way over your head. If you managed debt properly, you don't mind paying it back because you have the money to do so. This is not a generation-base phenomina - unless the Gen-Y/Millenial (sp?) generation learns from our mistakes, they'll be in the same boat...
--zawada
As an (un)interesting side note, undelete was done two different ways at Purdue until the mid '90s. The entomb system was written by the Computing Center folks IIRC. Over at the Engineering Computer Network (ECN), we had /zap. Any file you removed with rm was copied to the/zap/login (where login was the user's login) directory before complete removal. Every night a cron job would clean everything out of /zap that was more than 24 hours old. Unfortunately /zap wasn't as advanced as entomb and fat-fingered cp and mv mistakes were not recoverable. The folks at ECN (ghg, davy, jrs, et al) had only modified rm but they did not create a comprehensive library to link against. I believe ECN switched from /zap to entomb when they moved from SunOS to Solaris. One thing I can't recall was whether entomb could help you recover from using > instead of >>... (That was one I dealt with a lot as a site consultant...) Does anyone remember?
--zawada
American Tower Corp. (ATC) is in the business of buying/building towers so they can lease them to the wireless telecom and broadcast industries. (Many times they end up leasing them back to the folks they bought them from...) The map in the aforementioned link is a map of ALL of ATC's sites, which number somewhere around 14,000... The majority of the towers depicted on that map are NOT the ex-AT&T sites, rather those that ATC built themselves or obtained from other organizations. The non-AT&T towers are ATC's bread-and-butter and subsequently not for sale.
When American Tower bought the sites from AT&T a few years ago, the number of AT&T sites was only about 2,700 IIRC. Of the 2,700, ATC kept the best sites for their purposes and put 1000-1500 for sale. Since the ex-AT&T sites have been for sale for a couple of years now, they've been pretty well picked over and the best locations are long gone... So in other words: the above map shows almost two orders of magnitude more towers than what's for sale... don't get your hopes up.
--zawada
In US commercial and industrial settings, three phase power is used, so while the familiar 120 V line-to-neutral voltage is present, line-to-line (phase-to-phase) voltage is 208 V. 240 V is not common in an industrial or commercial building. Larger buildings are fed 480/277 V by the power company. This in turn is stepped down to 208/120 V with "dry type" transformers distributed throughout the building... Also, 277 V lighting is common in large buildings...
As for arcing between power and phone lines on a pole, this doesn't happen because there is a *lot* of distance between the power primary and the phone lines... Much more distance than say between the (bare) phase conductor(s) and the neutral. IIRC the "comms space" on a pole starts 18" below the neutral.
--zawada
This is exactly what the switch-mode power supply in your PC does. See How Stuff Works.
--zawada