Sorry, I neglected to mention my years of BBSing through middle/high school. Playing the doors, finding the places who supported z-modem so you didn't have to start that 1 meg download _all_over_ again when your modem crapped out.
The day I got my 2400 baud modem (with error correction AND compression), so I could download in 1/4 the time...of course only on the one board that had a 9600 baud modem on it.
Hell, at that point, I didn't even know how far fidonet was even connected. I didn't care anything about the internet. It was mostly a bunch of us local folks, and could care less about the people in the next state or the next country.
Then I got to college, and found mudding. Unfortunately, for most people to get a good connection to the internet (ie, telnet), you had to get a connection through a university, which normally meant attending, and you had to carefully balance mudding with grades, because if you got kicked out, you couldn't mud.
Then came Netscape, with its 4 simultaneous connections, mucking up all of the networks, and suddenly, you'd be trying to kill 4 trolls, only to get a network lockup, and wait and pray for 10 min, and then see your death shouts.
(bah...and I remember when people called me an adict for clocking 2hrs/day mudding)
But we'll get revenge on them all, once people realize that WAP is just gopher all over again!
For those who haven't yet seen it, check out Serious Sam from Croteam.
Of course, in an interview they said it was 5 years in the making, so it's not an overnight success thing. But there are still a few surprises out there.
Hell, I love coming back from a day off, and finding the flood of messages, including the ones from my boss with the subject 'where are you', when he forgot that he granted my leave 2 days ago.
And it doesn't help when people outside my department send me the 5 'urgent' notices to go along with their first request.
Or, my favorite, people who don't understand mailing lists, and so, set up their own distribution lists in their address book, and I have a dozen messages regarding a project I'm no longer assigned to, and even when I do mail people to get them to stop mailing me about it, the next day, someone who was out the day I asked everyone to stop mailing me does a 'reply all' to three of the earlier messages (not reading the whole thread first, and then writing one message), and it starts all over again.
That's not to say that e-mail doesn't have its advantages, but people need to learn how to use it correctly, and not assume that it's a direct replacement for a memos/meetings/phone calls/etc.
Solar cells based on amorphous silicon are less efficient than their crystalline cousins, but they still have many advantages, he says.
Although I can see some advantages of having flexible solar arrays, some of the issues right now aren't so much the flexibility, as most arrays are flat parts which fold up. If you need to fit to a curved surface, you just use a series of smaller cells to approximate the surface, and then use a conformal coating as a sealant.
The issues that I see, however, is that they admit that these are less efficient, how large of an array are we going to need to get a useful amount of power? Last time I looked into it [1995 or so], agricultural solar cells were considered to be about 20-22% efficient. Hughes Electronics at the time had some that were 35% efficient, but you were looking at paying through the nose for 'em [US$100k per square meter worth, assuming you could find a supplier]
Looking at some current numbers, it looks like these have a chance at being near 10% efficient. To take things into perspective, the typical solar car for the GM Sunrayce in 1995 had an 8 meter squared solar array, and produced at most 200W per square meter under optimal conditions. [Normally 100-150W]. If we assume that we're going to get 50W/meter from these clothes, we can compare them to a standard NiMH rechargable AA battery.
Looking at the battery stats on a very efficient laptop, you're looking at needing 10W to run it [50W*hr battery lasts 5hrs]. The Sony Vaio lists its power requirements as needing a peak of 49.5W. [A single battery is 1.8mAH@19.5V, so about 35W*hr, and lasts 2.5hr, so typical would be 14W draw].
Naturally, a larger, more feature rich portable would require more draw. Realistically, we might assume 20-30W. Which means we'd need 1/2 a meter squared of exposed surface. [about 775 sq in, or 5.4 sq ft]
So, based on these calculations, any of you skinny nerds are going to need to find a few more fat people wearing these shirts to sit next to you while you game.
[oh, and hey, it was 6 years ago when I was working on a solar car. My numbers may be off a bit, as I didn't get much sleep during those days]
I still own stock in a 'small' ISP [under 600 lines, DSL and dedicated service... I think they were at 46 lines when I started working there full time]. ISPs can be made profitable, but it definately takes some work.
The biggest problems are late payers and line hogs. We solved this problems with a little program that would look to see if the modems were filling up and/or if people had multiple connections who weren't supposed to. If the modems did fill up, it'd clear connections by bumping off people who owed us more than 2.5 months [which was basically to rule out prorated amounts + setup fee]. If it didn't get enough from that, it would bump off people who had been on more than 6hrs straight.
We'd have people calling us at 7pm, begging us come down to the office to drop off their payment as they just got dumped 4 times in a row, only to check their mail to find the 'this wouldn't have happened if you paid your bill' message.
As for CLECs, they're hurting because of the ruling that the ILECs don't have to pay thm reciprocal charges for termination to ISPs, because the internet qualifies as long distance. So the ISPs can't get the dirt cheap PRIs anymore. [But well, like anything, that's gross generalization, as prices fluctuate wildly by market]
The problem with most of the ISPs is that the people running them may have had good technical sense, but didn't have the business sense. Sure, you could get a loan and buy lots of equiptment, but how quickly can you get a return on the investment? You can have great sales, and undercut everyone's prices, but again, you have ROI issues. Your best bet is to stay small, cater to the users, make sure that your service is better than everyone else's in the area, and just wait for word of mouth. Your first users will be people who were kicked off of their other ISPs for being line hogs, etc, but with some incentives [refer us to (x) friends, get a month free!] you can get them to pull in their friends.
It also rather helped us that we had USR racks, and so we didn't suffer from the 2 version of kFlex issues before v.90 was finalized, and all of our competitors were either running older modems [AOL] or Lucent/Rockwell modems. We also had enough outgoing bandwidth to handle a full PRI while some of the others were running a channelized T1 through a 56k frame circuit.
If you play your cards right, and have good service, you can hit the point where people may leave you, but when they're done with the mandtory 3-6 months they had to sign with with the other guys, they're begging you to take 'em back.
Ahh....
I had forgotten that many people haven't learned the ways of the professors yet. There are two types of professors -- the tenured ones, and the good ones.
If you can help it, don't take classes from tenured teachers. They've been there too long. Find the associate professors who maybe teach one or two classes a semester, and hold a job in their field the rest of the time, or the ones who only teach classes in the spring, or only in the fall, etc, so they're still current on their topic.
I guess there are some fields for which this doesn't hold true (liberal arts), but one of my best engineering classes was taught by a guy who had retired from the Army Corps of Engineers and was teaching to kill time.
I've heard the stories of folks taking Computer Security classes, and having the teacher showing them slides from 1976 [well, it was 1995 at the time, at least], and being told 'oh, yeah, don't worry, they're old, but things haven't changed that much'
The larger of a school you go to, the better your chances are at managing to avoid certain professors. Of my least liked professor, who wrote the books for 5 of the classes, I only got stuck taking two of them with him. Hell, in one of 'em, the other professor refused to use his book, and actually gave us a book I could understand for Thermodynamics.
Oh...and I definately know all about the grants -- I tried blowing the whistle on a student project that was missing most of its equiptment because the faculty advisor was starting up his own business, and was claiming his students' work as the work of his company. Unfortunately, I didn't know he was responsible for a multimillion dollar grant, and so, he and the dean threatened to have me expelled and fired from my job at the university. [and I'd like to say that it's a bad idea to threaten people with root access to the main mail server on campus, from a computer security point of view]
Students may be able to cheat on exams Very doubtful, as the faculty know what's up on the web, also. Very few professors that I know of give the same test every semester. They do reuse concepts from the tests, but that's what you're supposed to be learning, so having old exams is not a bad thing.
Teachers may slack off on their intensity since students can just go online to learn Again, doubtful for a variety of reasons. Most teachers are there because they like to teach. If the class is 1/2 full, it may be easier for them, as they're teaching to a dedicated few who want to listen to them. From someone who's had to take classes from teachers who wrote their own books, I can tell you that the book's normally just as confusing as the teacher. With the teacher, at least you get a chance to ask questions.
Students can skip more classes That's one of the stupidest thing they could do. Not just for the reasons mentioned above, but unless you're taking a standardized test, it's the teacher who's writing the test. Although knowing the material is important, it's even more important to know what the teacher thinks is important. I got through college sleeping in class, because if I heard the teacher mention something twice, chances are, he mentioned it a half dozen times or so, and it was something significant. So I'd study that part. If the teacher never covered it, but the book had a whole chapter on it, I might skim it, but I'm not going to waste my time on it. And the teachers can change what they feel is important from year to year, so it may or may not have been significant before.
Learning someting with the assistance of a vocal teacher is not the same as reading it
As above, I agree, but you have to question what this resource is intended for. It's intended to give people outside MIT the knowledge that MIT already has. MIT students would be foolish to use only these notes. If a student were actively taking a class at another university, they'd be a dumbass to just read the MIT notes, and not go to their own classes. That's not to say, however, that these materials would be bad for someone to use as suplimental material. [Especially when you have a teacher who wrote the book, and reads from the book in classes, so even if you didn't understand what he said in class, you can't just read the book for a different explaination]. It's also useful for people wanting to learn on their own, or high school teachers not knowing what to do with some 15 year old who's too damned smart, and they just need to give him something to keep him tied up so he doesn't interupt the rest of the class who still hasn't learned the materials.
MIT can lose students since they could go to other universitiyes and still learn at their level
From this, I'd have to wonder just what you did in college. College has many, many purposes, and only one of them is book learning. First, you have to learn about youself-- are you really sure that what you picked as your major is something that you really want to do for the rest of your life? [I know I've done nothing with my BS in engineering for the last 4 years, but my college job is the computer center paid off]. Sure, this could realistically be done anywhere, so long as the school has enough diverse subjects. Additionally, college slows us down another 4 years before entering the workforce, which helps to keep us from flooding the market with raw labor which is willing to work for less than the people who have been working for Company X for the last 20-30 years. And again, this one can be done anywhere. So, we have to ask ourselves, what does MIT give us that other schools don't?
First off, the name. An engineering degree from MIT means more than an enginnering degree from Prince George's Community College. Sure, they're both ABET acredited, but the MIT diploma's going to get you that interview more often than not. Second, there's the networking. Faculty members often have side consulting jobs with various companies, and I'm guessing that MIT's career center has massive contacts due to alumni and companies who want their students. Networking is one of the things that people seem to overlook the most about a college.
Upkeep may be hellish
That's what databases are for. A well designed site is easy to maintain. A poorly designed site takes almost as long to make changes as it did to make the whole things in the first place.
I know you're saying that your good points outweigh your bad points, but well, I still think your bad points were overinflated to start with. If a student does poorly because of this system, there's a reasonable chance that it's due to the student, and not the system.
Actually, I remember an attempted stabbing at my high school in um...1991?
I was working in the darkroom, trying to get my negatives developed. One of the pricks in the class (whom I later learned had been responsible for stealing my walkman), was flipping on and off the red light. [So it was going from red to pitch black].
Someone else went to come in through the revolving door, and tripped over the lip in the darkness, dropping a text book which flew across the room [darkrooms are small], leanding near me, knocking back the bottle of fixer. Once the red light came back on, I found the book, and as the fixer was missing (knocked under the sink, I later found out, but it didn't tip over), got pissed and through the book at the wall near the door.... right as someone else came into the dark room.
The prick who was still fucking with the lights started pulling the 'I wouldn't let him get away with that if I were you' shit, and I ended up in a staring contest with the guy who had just come in. I thought I stared him down, but right as he broke my glance, he swung at me. [naturally, breaking my glasses, and leaving a nice gash where they hit against my face]
Of course, that was the only hit he got in, as I then got one of his arms behind him, and his throat. What I didn't know, however, which the dick playing with the lights did, however, was that he had a knife on him, which he had been showing off earlier. My only saving grace was that it was a floding knife that he couldn't open one handed, so he tried stabbing me with a closed knife.
After a few minutes of a stalemate, as both my hands were occupied, and he wasn't doing much good with his, and he was having trouble breathing, we both gave up and left the darkroom.
And I still want to beat the shit out of the prick who was playing with the lights, too. I hold no grudge, however, for the person who actually hit me, as well, I just have to feel sorry for him for trying to stab me with a closed knife.
I remember back in high school taking an x-acto knife in sight of the teacher, and drawing patterns in my arm senior year. I remember when we had to do the 'build a tower from straws and pins' project freshman year, and using my arm as a pin cushion. [again, in front of the teacher].
Each time, the teachers didn't blink.
For some reason, the substitute teachers seemed to have more of a problem with my actions than the full time ones did. [Something about flipping a desk over with a kid still sitting in it when I was having a bad day, and he pissed me off more]
Most of the teachers just shrug it off, as they've seen too much of it over the years. Sure, I never killed anyone over the years, but when I was picked on, I didn't tend to back down, either. If it wasn't for the satisfaction of grabbing some prick by his throat and shoving him up against a wall, I'd not have had any form of release, and might have snapped worse than I did.
Personally, I still want to kill the bitch yearbook editor who made me edit my entry twice, and then said nothing, and changed the thing to 'Don't do drugs and strive to succeed' for the 'blatant drug references' in my message. However, I know that she's going to take care of herself over the years, as shown by the kid who pushed her down the stairs a few years later. [People _do_ get what's coming to them if you're patient... and you don't have to do the time for it]
Lower power consumption means that the thing requires less power. It does not directly mean that things will be built with the same size batteries. With the decreased power consumption, manufacturers can scale down the size of the batteries, meaning it costs them less to manufacture, and bringing down the overall weight and size of the device.
This has more significant advantages on things that aren't constrained by keyboards and hard drives. PDAs are a prime example. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd guess that batteries are a significant amount of the weight in many of them.
If they do pull this off, and it's not another LEP (Light Emitting Polymer, which made the cheaper/lower power/better viewing angle/no backlighting/higher res claims 5 years ago), then I'd personally rather have them take a single battery, and give us twice as many battery slots. [Single batteries suck, as do ones they are keyed by the bay, as you can't rotate through 3 batteries easily]
After looking at my first response, I realized it might have come off as 'there's no way in hell they really went out of their way to answer your letter'.
Chances are, they took more time on yours than they did on others, as there are probably quite a few that they just outright trash without even blinking.
Here's a few hints for you who might want to mail your representatives --
Mail a seperate copy to each one. I know, there's Bcc, but people will recognize that you're mailing it to more than one person. [And you sure as hell don't put it all in To: or CC:, as then they'll know they were 345 of the 347 of people you mailed.]
Tell them why they should care. In the case of congressmen, tell 'em where you live, so they realize that you're in their district, so you're one of the people who affects their re-election.
Don't use form letters. Sure, someone's got some nice 'copy and paste this to send to whomever' form letter. If if's the first one they get, they might be impressed. When you're the 200th one they've seen, they couldn't really give a shit. [And it's not like they have to read it. They can recognize it from the layout of the page]
Be polite. You'd be amazed how many people bitch and bitch, and you just want to choke the damned ignorant ungrateful bastards. When you get the one nice message after 30 some rude ones, you're a little more likely to take some time on this one, so you don't have to go back through the rest of the rude ones.
Be constructive. If you're going to complain about something, give suggestions for improvements. There's no point in telling someone that something sucks, unless you can suggest an alternative for them to do instead.
From my days of dealing with a hundred or more email a day, you quickly learn just how important form letters are so that you can get back to your other work. When done right, however, it doesn't look like a form letter.
The first few times you receive something on a new topic, you actually respond to the person. Buy the third or fourth time, you're copying the bulk of the response from one of the earlier messages.
Once you've got a reply that you really like, you save it somewhere, so you can grab it when needed. The next time someone asks the question, you insert the text file. You trim out any bits that aren't relevant to their question [one of the sure signs of form letters], and you might tack in a sentance or two in there to make sure you highlight the answer to their question. [Eg, 'To explain why we're doing X, you really have to understand the whole process behind Y']
Once you're replied, you save their message to the appropriate bin, so that when you have to report to your boss later, you can state that 27 people complained today about A, 14 about B, and you received 42 copies of 'The Internet Spy'.
Yes, it's nice that they haven't tried shutting down other polls due to their patent. However, the fact is, they patented something, and with that patent, could decide at a moment's notice to sue someone over it, and tie things up in courts for months, if they wanted to.
The fact that they haven't yet done it is a good thing. The fact that they have it, and the money to ride things out in court for a few months to take down some other company isn't.
Have you ever thought about using a radio modem to a chase vehicle? When I was working on my school's solar car project in 1995, we had a van loaded with various telemetry equiptment, including a radio modem connection to the car, so that we could get speed, battery consumption, etc.
I don't know enough about your race, but with a power inverter, a few space car batteries, and someone willing to follow you in a car, this wouldn't be that hard to pull off.
[If, however, the race route is completely closed off to vehicles, this would be more difficult].
You might also look into other forms of communication. Check to see if Metricom has access in our area, or someone like them. [I haven't had one of their modems since '97, but the modem at that time had a battery which lasted me a good 3-4 hrs of constant use.]
With the chase vehicle concept, you might also try looking at X10 gear, but I don't know what their power consumption is.
Re:So it's a good thing that's NOT what they're do
on
VeriSign Usurps .com
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· Score: 2
I can't find any mention of it stating that, either. As it also refers to 'non-commercial organizations', I would assume that it's not talking about registered non-profit organizations, but would include not-for-profit and non-commercial organizations.
I personally own two.org domains, one of which is for a registered non-profit, and one of which (annoying.org) is purely personal.
If you do have issues with the proposal, use the message board ICANN set up for discussion of this topic. You're more likely to get authoritative answers to your questions, and if you have a valid point against the proposal, you might even get it stopped or amended.
Unintentional or not, I spell just fine, it's that connection between the brain and keyboard that I have problems with.
So it's a good thing that's NOT what they're doing
on
VeriSign Usurps .com
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· Score: 5
This article needs some significant damage control.
Rather than completely post what I already did to another paniced message, let me summarize --
Whomever submitted this to Slashdot in some way mis-read a word in the ICANN proposal.
That one word was 'organization', and not 'corporation'. In section D-2:
The net result of this would be a.org registry returned, after some appropriate transition period, to its originally intended function as a registry operated by and for non-profit organizations.
Now, technically, that may not be exactly what the original intention for.org was, however, that error is insignificant as compared to the difference between organizations & corporations.
As we all know from the late sccopthis.com, if it's on the internet, it must be true. That's just not the case. Whomever posted this message made a significant change to the text.
From the ICANN web site, which was linked to in the slashdot article, section D:
2. The.org Registry Agreement would adopt the form of the registry agreements that will be entered into by the new global TLD
registry operators. The term of the.org Registry Agreement would be shortened by almost one year to 31 December 2002, at
which time VeriSign would permanently relinquish its right to operate the.org registry, and an appropriate sponsoring
organization representing non-commercial organizations would be sought (through some procedure yet to be determined) to
assume the operation of the registry. In addition, VeriSign would establish an endowment of $5 million for the purpose of funding
the reasonable operating expenses of a global registry for the specific use of non-profit organizations, and would make global
resolution resources available to the operator of the.org registry for no charge for one year and on terms to be determined
thereafter, for so long as it operates the.com registry. The net result of this would be a.org registry returned, after some
appropriate transition period, to its originally intended function as a registry operated by and for non-profit organizations.
Please note -- the key word was either 'non-profit organization' or 'non-commercial orgranization'. It said nothing about 'non-profit corporation'.
I plan on keeping both of my.org domains [the only two domains I have], one of which is a registered non-profit group, and the other one is not-for-profit, as it's a personal site.
Please read the articles to which people are commenting on, as a simple inintentional word change can have a dramatic change on the entire meaning.
It was rolling brownouts, not blackouts, at least in DC. [And that was the same summer that the DC water treatment system kept going ass-up, and my university was giving everyone rations of bottled water.]
Of course, our area never got hit by the brownouts, which made me even more pissed that I had shut everything off and wasn't mudding. [I think that was the last time that I painted any of my WH40k models]
I admit that I haven't been keeping up on the spam filtering stuff as much since I changed jobs, but from my reading of this article, the author suggests that people using MAPS can't get to the sites being hosted by sites blacklisted by MAPS.
Unless something's changed dramaticaly, this just isn't how MAPS works, or any of the half dozen or so mail blacklists. They just keep people from being able to send mail to the system using MAPS.
[It's actually more complicated than that, as it may just flag it as questionable, it may reject, etc.]
But I've never seen someone set it up to filter all traffic, not just incoming SMTP. [That's not to say it happens, but I'm guessing that if people do it, it's a small percentage of MAPS users, and so a fraction of a percent of systems out there, and not the 2% claimed by the author]
Again, it's quite possible that I'm wrong, but this article just reeks of fishiness to me.
Hmm... So I guess my designation as 'Systems Programmer' means that I don't really exist, right?
[and yes, I do crimp my own cables... at home at least, because I'm cheap. But it's a bitch finding places that'll sell cat5 stranded and stranded ends, as everyone seems to only stock solid cable in this area, and expect you to pay out the ass for pre-made patch cables]
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I neglected to mention my years of BBSing through middle/high school. Playing the doors, finding the places who supported z-modem so you didn't have to start that 1 meg download _all_over_ again when your modem crapped out.
The day I got my 2400 baud modem (with error correction AND compression), so I could download in 1/4 the time...of course only on the one board that had a 9600 baud modem on it.
Hell, at that point, I didn't even know how far fidonet was even connected. I didn't care anything about the internet. It was mostly a bunch of us local folks, and could care less about the people in the next state or the next country.
Then I got to college, and found mudding. Unfortunately, for most people to get a good connection to the internet (ie, telnet), you had to get a connection through a university, which normally meant attending, and you had to carefully balance mudding with grades, because if you got kicked out, you couldn't mud.
The days of gopher, IRC, usenet and mudding.
Then came Netscape, with its 4 simultaneous connections, mucking up all of the networks, and suddenly, you'd be trying to kill 4 trolls, only to get a network lockup, and wait and pray for 10 min, and then see your death shouts.
(bah...and I remember when people called me an adict for clocking 2hrs/day mudding)
But we'll get revenge on them all, once people realize that WAP is just gopher all over again!
For those who haven't yet seen it, check out Serious Sam from Croteam.
Of course, in an interview they said it was 5 years in the making, so it's not an overnight success thing. But there are still a few surprises out there.
Obviously, you don't have the dual-recliner, fold out center table w/ build in speaker phone, and massage units in the recliners.
Of course, all the sofa said to do was plug in three things (2 AC, one phone), and we haven't needed any other instructions on it.
Non-time critical?
Hell, I love coming back from a day off, and finding the flood of messages, including the ones from my boss with the subject 'where are you', when he forgot that he granted my leave 2 days ago.
And it doesn't help when people outside my department send me the 5 'urgent' notices to go along with their first request.
Or, my favorite, people who don't understand mailing lists, and so, set up their own distribution lists in their address book, and I have a dozen messages regarding a project I'm no longer assigned to, and even when I do mail people to get them to stop mailing me about it, the next day, someone who was out the day I asked everyone to stop mailing me does a 'reply all' to three of the earlier messages (not reading the whole thread first, and then writing one message), and it starts all over again.
That's not to say that e-mail doesn't have its advantages, but people need to learn how to use it correctly, and not assume that it's a direct replacement for a memos/meetings/phone calls/etc.
Solar cells based on amorphous silicon are less efficient than their crystalline cousins, but they still have many advantages, he says.
Although I can see some advantages of having flexible solar arrays, some of the issues right now aren't so much the flexibility, as most arrays are flat parts which fold up. If you need to fit to a curved surface, you just use a series of smaller cells to approximate the surface, and then use a conformal coating as a sealant.
The issues that I see, however, is that they admit that these are less efficient, how large of an array are we going to need to get a useful amount of power? Last time I looked into it [1995 or so], agricultural solar cells were considered to be about 20-22% efficient. Hughes Electronics at the time had some that were 35% efficient, but you were looking at paying through the nose for 'em [US$100k per square meter worth, assuming you could find a supplier]
Looking at some current numbers, it looks like these have a chance at being near 10% efficient. To take things into perspective, the typical solar car for the GM Sunrayce in 1995 had an 8 meter squared solar array, and produced at most 200W per square meter under optimal conditions. [Normally 100-150W]. If we assume that we're going to get 50W/meter from these clothes, we can compare them to a standard NiMH rechargable AA battery.
Looking at the battery stats on a very efficient laptop, you're looking at needing 10W to run it [50W*hr battery lasts 5hrs]. The Sony Vaio lists its power requirements as needing a peak of 49.5W. [A single battery is 1.8mAH@19.5V, so about 35W*hr, and lasts 2.5hr, so typical would be 14W draw].
Naturally, a larger, more feature rich portable would require more draw. Realistically, we might assume 20-30W. Which means we'd need 1/2 a meter squared of exposed surface. [about 775 sq in, or 5.4 sq ft]
So, based on these calculations, any of you skinny nerds are going to need to find a few more fat people wearing these shirts to sit next to you while you game.
[oh, and hey, it was 6 years ago when I was working on a solar car. My numbers may be off a bit, as I didn't get much sleep during those days]
I still own stock in a 'small' ISP [under 600 lines, DSL and dedicated service... I think they were at 46 lines when I started working there full time]. ISPs can be made profitable, but it definately takes some work.
The biggest problems are late payers and line hogs. We solved this problems with a little program that would look to see if the modems were filling up and/or if people had multiple connections who weren't supposed to. If the modems did fill up, it'd clear connections by bumping off people who owed us more than 2.5 months [which was basically to rule out prorated amounts + setup fee]. If it didn't get enough from that, it would bump off people who had been on more than 6hrs straight.
We'd have people calling us at 7pm, begging us come down to the office to drop off their payment as they just got dumped 4 times in a row, only to check their mail to find the 'this wouldn't have happened if you paid your bill' message.
As for CLECs, they're hurting because of the ruling that the ILECs don't have to pay thm reciprocal charges for termination to ISPs, because the internet qualifies as long distance. So the ISPs can't get the dirt cheap PRIs anymore. [But well, like anything, that's gross generalization, as prices fluctuate wildly by market]
The problem with most of the ISPs is that the people running them may have had good technical sense, but didn't have the business sense. Sure, you could get a loan and buy lots of equiptment, but how quickly can you get a return on the investment? You can have great sales, and undercut everyone's prices, but again, you have ROI issues. Your best bet is to stay small, cater to the users, make sure that your service is better than everyone else's in the area, and just wait for word of mouth. Your first users will be people who were kicked off of their other ISPs for being line hogs, etc, but with some incentives [refer us to (x) friends, get a month free!] you can get them to pull in their friends.
It also rather helped us that we had USR racks, and so we didn't suffer from the 2 version of kFlex issues before v.90 was finalized, and all of our competitors were either running older modems [AOL] or Lucent/Rockwell modems. We also had enough outgoing bandwidth to handle a full PRI while some of the others were running a channelized T1 through a 56k frame circuit.
If you play your cards right, and have good service, you can hit the point where people may leave you, but when they're done with the mandtory 3-6 months they had to sign with with the other guys, they're begging you to take 'em back.
Ahh....
I had forgotten that many people haven't learned the ways of the professors yet. There are two types of professors -- the tenured ones, and the good ones.
If you can help it, don't take classes from tenured teachers. They've been there too long. Find the associate professors who maybe teach one or two classes a semester, and hold a job in their field the rest of the time, or the ones who only teach classes in the spring, or only in the fall, etc, so they're still current on their topic.
I guess there are some fields for which this doesn't hold true (liberal arts), but one of my best engineering classes was taught by a guy who had retired from the Army Corps of Engineers and was teaching to kill time.
I've heard the stories of folks taking Computer Security classes, and having the teacher showing them slides from 1976 [well, it was 1995 at the time, at least], and being told 'oh, yeah, don't worry, they're old, but things haven't changed that much'
The larger of a school you go to, the better your chances are at managing to avoid certain professors. Of my least liked professor, who wrote the books for 5 of the classes, I only got stuck taking two of them with him. Hell, in one of 'em, the other professor refused to use his book, and actually gave us a book I could understand for Thermodynamics.
Oh...and I definately know all about the grants -- I tried blowing the whistle on a student project that was missing most of its equiptment because the faculty advisor was starting up his own business, and was claiming his students' work as the work of his company. Unfortunately, I didn't know he was responsible for a multimillion dollar grant, and so, he and the dean threatened to have me expelled and fired from my job at the university. [and I'd like to say that it's a bad idea to threaten people with root access to the main mail server on campus, from a computer security point of view]
- Students may be able to cheat on exams
- Teachers may slack off on their intensity since students can just go online to learn
- Students can skip more classes
- Learning someting with the assistance of a vocal teacher is not the same as reading it
As above, I agree, but you have to question what this resource is intended for. It's intended to give people outside MIT the knowledge that MIT already has. MIT students would be foolish to use only these notes. If a student were actively taking a class at another university, they'd be a dumbass to just read the MIT notes, and not go to their own classes. That's not to say, however, that these materials would be bad for someone to use as suplimental material. [Especially when you have a teacher who wrote the book, and reads from the book in classes, so even if you didn't understand what he said in class, you can't just read the book for a different explaination]. It's also useful for people wanting to learn on their own, or high school teachers not knowing what to do with some 15 year old who's too damned smart, and they just need to give him something to keep him tied up so he doesn't interupt the rest of the class who still hasn't learned the materials.
- MIT can lose students since they could go to other universitiyes and still learn at their level
- Upkeep may be hellish
I know you're saying that your good points outweigh your bad points, but well, I still think your bad points were overinflated to start with. If a student does poorly because of this system, there's a reasonable chance that it's due to the student, and not the system.Very doubtful, as the faculty know what's up on the web, also. Very few professors that I know of give the same test every semester. They do reuse concepts from the tests, but that's what you're supposed to be learning, so having old exams is not a bad thing.
Again, doubtful for a variety of reasons. Most teachers are there because they like to teach. If the class is 1/2 full, it may be easier for them, as they're teaching to a dedicated few who want to listen to them. From someone who's had to take classes from teachers who wrote their own books, I can tell you that the book's normally just as confusing as the teacher. With the teacher, at least you get a chance to ask questions.
That's one of the stupidest thing they could do. Not just for the reasons mentioned above, but unless you're taking a standardized test, it's the teacher who's writing the test. Although knowing the material is important, it's even more important to know what the teacher thinks is important. I got through college sleeping in class, because if I heard the teacher mention something twice, chances are, he mentioned it a half dozen times or so, and it was something significant. So I'd study that part. If the teacher never covered it, but the book had a whole chapter on it, I might skim it, but I'm not going to waste my time on it. And the teachers can change what they feel is important from year to year, so it may or may not have been significant before.
From this, I'd have to wonder just what you did in college. College has many, many purposes, and only one of them is book learning. First, you have to learn about youself-- are you really sure that what you picked as your major is something that you really want to do for the rest of your life? [I know I've done nothing with my BS in engineering for the last 4 years, but my college job is the computer center paid off]. Sure, this could realistically be done anywhere, so long as the school has enough diverse subjects. Additionally, college slows us down another 4 years before entering the workforce, which helps to keep us from flooding the market with raw labor which is willing to work for less than the people who have been working for Company X for the last 20-30 years. And again, this one can be done anywhere. So, we have to ask ourselves, what does MIT give us that other schools don't?
First off, the name. An engineering degree from MIT means more than an enginnering degree from Prince George's Community College. Sure, they're both ABET acredited, but the MIT diploma's going to get you that interview more often than not. Second, there's the networking. Faculty members often have side consulting jobs with various companies, and I'm guessing that MIT's career center has massive contacts due to alumni and companies who want their students. Networking is one of the things that people seem to overlook the most about a college.
That's what databases are for. A well designed site is easy to maintain. A poorly designed site takes almost as long to make changes as it did to make the whole things in the first place.
Actually, I remember an attempted stabbing at my high school in um...1991?
I was working in the darkroom, trying to get my negatives developed. One of the pricks in the class (whom I later learned had been responsible for stealing my walkman), was flipping on and off the red light. [So it was going from red to pitch black].
Someone else went to come in through the revolving door, and tripped over the lip in the darkness, dropping a text book which flew across the room [darkrooms are small], leanding near me, knocking back the bottle of fixer. Once the red light came back on, I found the book, and as the fixer was missing (knocked under the sink, I later found out, but it didn't tip over), got pissed and through the book at the wall near the door.... right as someone else came into the dark room.
The prick who was still fucking with the lights started pulling the 'I wouldn't let him get away with that if I were you' shit, and I ended up in a staring contest with the guy who had just come in. I thought I stared him down, but right as he broke my glance, he swung at me. [naturally, breaking my glasses, and leaving a nice gash where they hit against my face]
Of course, that was the only hit he got in, as I then got one of his arms behind him, and his throat. What I didn't know, however, which the dick playing with the lights did, however, was that he had a knife on him, which he had been showing off earlier. My only saving grace was that it was a floding knife that he couldn't open one handed, so he tried stabbing me with a closed knife.
After a few minutes of a stalemate, as both my hands were occupied, and he wasn't doing much good with his, and he was having trouble breathing, we both gave up and left the darkroom.
And I still want to beat the shit out of the prick who was playing with the lights, too. I hold no grudge, however, for the person who actually hit me, as well, I just have to feel sorry for him for trying to stab me with a closed knife.
I remember back in high school taking an x-acto knife in sight of the teacher, and drawing patterns in my arm senior year. I remember when we had to do the 'build a tower from straws and pins' project freshman year, and using my arm as a pin cushion. [again, in front of the teacher].
Each time, the teachers didn't blink.
For some reason, the substitute teachers seemed to have more of a problem with my actions than the full time ones did. [Something about flipping a desk over with a kid still sitting in it when I was having a bad day, and he pissed me off more]
Most of the teachers just shrug it off, as they've seen too much of it over the years. Sure, I never killed anyone over the years, but when I was picked on, I didn't tend to back down, either. If it wasn't for the satisfaction of grabbing some prick by his throat and shoving him up against a wall, I'd not have had any form of release, and might have snapped worse than I did.
Personally, I still want to kill the bitch yearbook editor who made me edit my entry twice, and then said nothing, and changed the thing to 'Don't do drugs and strive to succeed' for the 'blatant drug references' in my message. However, I know that she's going to take care of herself over the years, as shown by the kid who pushed her down the stairs a few years later. [People _do_ get what's coming to them if you're patient... and you don't have to do the time for it]
Lower power consumption means that the thing requires less power. It does not directly mean that things will be built with the same size batteries. With the decreased power consumption, manufacturers can scale down the size of the batteries, meaning it costs them less to manufacture, and bringing down the overall weight and size of the device.
This has more significant advantages on things that aren't constrained by keyboards and hard drives. PDAs are a prime example. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd guess that batteries are a significant amount of the weight in many of them.
If they do pull this off, and it's not another LEP (Light Emitting Polymer, which made the cheaper/lower power/better viewing angle/no backlighting/higher res claims 5 years ago), then I'd personally rather have them take a single battery, and give us twice as many battery slots. [Single batteries suck, as do ones they are keyed by the bay, as you can't rotate through 3 batteries easily]
Chances are, they took more time on yours than they did on others, as there are probably quite a few that they just outright trash without even blinking.
Here's a few hints for you who might want to mail your representatives --
I know, there's Bcc, but people will recognize that you're mailing it to more than one person. [And you sure as hell don't put it all in To: or CC:, as then they'll know they were 345 of the 347 of people you mailed.]
In the case of congressmen, tell 'em where you live, so they realize that you're in their district, so you're one of the people who affects their re-election.
Sure, someone's got some nice 'copy and paste this to send to whomever' form letter. If if's the first one they get, they might be impressed. When you're the 200th one they've seen, they couldn't really give a shit. [And it's not like they have to read it. They can recognize it from the layout of the page]
You'd be amazed how many people bitch and bitch, and you just want to choke the damned ignorant ungrateful bastards. When you get the one nice message after 30 some rude ones, you're a little more likely to take some time on this one, so you don't have to go back through the rest of the rude ones.
If you're going to complain about something, give suggestions for improvements. There's no point in telling someone that something sucks, unless you can suggest an alternative for them to do instead.
From my days of dealing with a hundred or more email a day, you quickly learn just how important form letters are so that you can get back to your other work. When done right, however, it doesn't look like a form letter.
The first few times you receive something on a new topic, you actually respond to the person. Buy the third or fourth time, you're copying the bulk of the response from one of the earlier messages.
Once you've got a reply that you really like, you save it somewhere, so you can grab it when needed. The next time someone asks the question, you insert the text file. You trim out any bits that aren't relevant to their question [one of the sure signs of form letters], and you might tack in a sentance or two in there to make sure you highlight the answer to their question. [Eg, 'To explain why we're doing X, you really have to understand the whole process behind Y']
Once you're replied, you save their message to the appropriate bin, so that when you have to report to your boss later, you can state that 27 people complained today about A, 14 about B, and you received 42 copies of 'The Internet Spy'.
Yes, it's nice that they haven't tried shutting down other polls due to their patent. However, the fact is, they patented something, and with that patent, could decide at a moment's notice to sue someone over it, and tie things up in courts for months, if they wanted to.
The fact that they haven't yet done it is a good thing. The fact that they have it, and the money to ride things out in court for a few months to take down some other company isn't.
Have you ever thought about using a radio modem to a chase vehicle? When I was working on my school's solar car project in 1995, we had a van loaded with various telemetry equiptment, including a radio modem connection to the car, so that we could get speed, battery consumption, etc.
I don't know enough about your race, but with a power inverter, a few space car batteries, and someone willing to follow you in a car, this wouldn't be that hard to pull off.
[If, however, the race route is completely closed off to vehicles, this would be more difficult].
You might also look into other forms of communication. Check to see if Metricom has access in our area, or someone like them. [I haven't had one of their modems since '97, but the modem at that time had a battery which lasted me a good 3-4 hrs of constant use.]
With the chase vehicle concept, you might also try looking at X10 gear, but I don't know what their power consumption is.
I can't find any mention of it stating that, either. As it also refers to 'non-commercial organizations', I would assume that it's not talking about registered non-profit organizations, but would include not-for-profit and non-commercial organizations.
.org domains, one of which is for a registered non-profit, and one of which (annoying.org) is purely personal.
I personally own two
If you do have issues with the proposal, use the message board ICANN set up for discussion of this topic. You're more likely to get authoritative answers to your questions, and if you have a valid point against the proposal, you might even get it stopped or amended.
nope, I just can't type.
Unintentional or not, I spell just fine, it's that connection between the brain and keyboard that I have problems with.
Rather than completely post what I already did to another paniced message, let me summarize --
Whomever submitted this to Slashdot in some way mis-read a word in the ICANN proposal.
That one word was 'organization', and not 'corporation'. In section D-2:
Now, technically, that may not be exactly what the original intention for
From the ICANN web site, which was linked to in the slashdot article, section D:
Please note -- the key word was either 'non-profit organization' or 'non-commercial orgranization'. It said nothing about 'non-profit corporation'.I plan on keeping both of my .org domains [the only two domains I have], one of which is a registered non-profit group, and the other one is not-for-profit, as it's a personal site.
Please read the articles to which people are commenting on, as a simple inintentional word change can have a dramatic change on the entire meaning.
#ifndef troll
#define troll
This_is_spam.c:5: unbalanced `#endif'
#endif
It was rolling brownouts, not blackouts, at least in DC. [And that was the same summer that the DC water treatment system kept going ass-up, and my university was giving everyone rations of bottled water.]
Of course, our area never got hit by the brownouts, which made me even more pissed that I had shut everything off and wasn't mudding. [I think that was the last time that I painted any of my WH40k models]
And there I was, afraid that if I got the new portable, I wouldn't be able to take it with me whenever I travel.
Hmmm...now I just have to con my work into buying it for me.
I admit that I haven't been keeping up on the spam filtering stuff as much since I changed jobs, but from my reading of this article, the author suggests that people using MAPS can't get to the sites being hosted by sites blacklisted by MAPS.
Unless something's changed dramaticaly, this just isn't how MAPS works, or any of the half dozen or so mail blacklists. They just keep people from being able to send mail to the system using MAPS.
[It's actually more complicated than that, as it may just flag it as questionable, it may reject, etc.]
But I've never seen someone set it up to filter all traffic, not just incoming SMTP. [That's not to say it happens, but I'm guessing that if people do it, it's a small percentage of MAPS users, and so a fraction of a percent of systems out there, and not the 2% claimed by the author]
Again, it's quite possible that I'm wrong, but this article just reeks of fishiness to me.
Hmm... So I guess my designation as 'Systems Programmer' means that I don't really exist, right?
[and yes, I do crimp my own cables... at home at least, because I'm cheap. But it's a bitch finding places that'll sell cat5 stranded and stranded ends, as everyone seems to only stock solid cable in this area, and expect you to pay out the ass for pre-made patch cables]