IEEE has closed their group health plan to new subscribers, and is looking for a way to end the plan altogether. If you aren't already a subscriber to the plan, then even if you've been an IEEE member for years, you won't be able to join the plan. I'm already in it, and got a certified letter from them a couple of weeks ago, explaining the major changes that they're making in the plan this year, to try and keep it solvent; closing the plan to new subscribers was one of those changes.
Here's the followup traffic from a Civil Air Patrol mission in California about 10 years ago, where the errant signal was traced to a self-serve hot pizza machine (a freezer full of pizza, a microwave oven, a chute to move frozen pizzas from the freezer to the oven, and a coin/cash machine to collect the money).
ROUTINE 072338Z MAY 93 HEADQUARTERS CALIFORNIA WING/MCO [NAME DELETED] HEADQUARTERS ALL UNITS CALIFORNIA WING INFO CC DO CALO BT ATTENTION EMERGENCY SERVICES PERSONNEL SEARCH MISSION 93XM0956 OPENED 6 MAY AND CLOSED 7 MAY FOR A SIGNAL INTERFERENCE ON 121.5. SIGNAL LOCATED AND SECURED IN A HOT PIZZA MACHINE IN NORTH PALM SPRINGS. THANKS TO MAJOR [NAME DELETED], FIRST LIEUTENANT [NAME DELETED] AND SECOND LIEUTENANT [NAME DELETED] OF SQUADRON 11 FOR THEIR ASSISTANCE ON THIS MISSION. BT P.S. NO FREE PIZZA. END OF MESSAGE
In the mid-late 80's (around 87 or so), Berkeley bought diskless Sun 3/50's by the truckload, thanks to an administrator who loved technology but didn't grok budgets (he blew something like 10 years' worth of budget in one wad; dunno how he got away with it, but he didn't last long).
They bought them so fast, in fact, that they couldn't get them into service before their 90-day warranties expired... And then, after the warranties had expired, they discovered that some significant percentage of them were DOA. They had to work a special deal with Sun to get those fixed.
XCF wrote this totally hot air grant proposal, and managed to talk their way into a half dozen or so of these systems, plus a server for them (a Sun 3/180, if I recall correctly; maybe it was a 3/280). Which they then proceeded to name them "scam", "scheme", "fraud", "greed", "swindle",...:-)
I was an EECS undergrad at Berkeley at the time, and hung out with a bunch of the XCF folks. I seem to recall that much XCF time and energy at the time was devoted to whupping MIT's butt at xtrek...
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IEEE has closed their group health plan to new subscribers, and is looking for a way to end the plan altogether. If you aren't already a subscriber to the plan, then even if you've been an IEEE member for years, you won't be able to join the plan. I'm already in it, and got a certified letter from them a couple of weeks ago, explaining the major changes that they're making in the plan this year, to try and keep it solvent; closing the plan to new subscribers was one of those changes.
In the mid-late 80's (around 87 or so), Berkeley bought diskless Sun 3/50's by the truckload, thanks to an administrator who loved technology but didn't grok budgets (he blew something like 10 years' worth of budget in one wad; dunno how he got away with it, but he didn't last long).
... :-)
They bought them so fast, in fact, that they couldn't get them into service before their 90-day warranties expired... And then, after the warranties had expired, they discovered that some significant percentage of them were DOA. They had to work a special deal with Sun to get those fixed.
XCF wrote this totally hot air grant proposal, and managed to talk their way into a half dozen or so of these systems, plus a server for them (a Sun 3/180, if I recall correctly; maybe it was a 3/280). Which they then proceeded to name them "scam", "scheme", "fraud", "greed", "swindle",
I was an EECS undergrad at Berkeley at the time, and hung out with a bunch of the XCF folks. I seem to recall that much XCF time and energy at the time was devoted to whupping MIT's butt at xtrek...