Why, in my day we had to go uphill both ways in the snow to school.

[Leo J Mauler]

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 19:06:17 -0600 Greg Kedrovsky
<greg at iglesia-del-este.com> writes:
> On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 06:53:55AM -0600, Leo J Mauler wrote:
> > 
> > So you might want to look into getting a full-size Satellite Dish 
> with a
> > K-Band port and see about receiving data through it.
> 
> Okay, this I don't understand. Maybe it's the difference 
> between "K-Band" and whatever else is offered through 
> folks like DirecWay. 
> Why would a full-size dish be any different than the wee 
> fashionable one that DTV or DirecWay sells/leases? 
> Wouldn't I still have to get some ISP to provide me signal, 
> and then I'd be hosed because I'm in Central America? 
> Or, does a full-size dish allow me the possibility of 
> simply grabbing stray signals and hacking into the net 
> that way?

As I understood the FidoNet Satellite service, you could arrange file
transfers through an existing large-dish network.  The way it used to
work was make an arrangement with your large-dish satellite provider to
transfer data as well as television signal, then start the transfers
using an existing dial-up ISP account.  The data transfer would be
streamed to your satellite dish (with enough downstream bandwidth they
could replace bi-directional error correction with sending multiple
copies of each packet).

Now, this isn't the solution for high-speed web browsing, but if you run
across a new Linux distro CD you'd like to have, you can just have it
transferred through the large-dish satellite network.

> > It might take some jiggering and kludging to get it to 
> > work as part of your home network, but you should 
> > see fairly fast download speeds this way, if not 
> > upload speeds.  Heck, for all I know full-size Satellite 
> > Dishes might even have some better way of handling 
> > downloads by now.
> 
> It sounds interesting. I would doubt it's totally legal, but 
> maybe it's one of those things that's not so much "illegal" 
> as it is simply "not mentioned" in laws around here. 

It's not illegal, its just not a perfect replacement for regular 
broadband.  Its like getting a high-speed replacement for 
slow dial-up FTP, but not for HTTP.

> There are 5 other families building houses on lots right 
> next to mine (small little urbanization/residential). I might 
> be able to defray costs...  :-)

See if your local ISP allows dual modem connections to 
boost speed.  It would at least be a better backup solution 
to your wireless connection than plain old dial-up, and two 
ISP accounts should cost about the same as regular cable 
or satellite broadband here in the U.S.A. (approx $20-40 
a month). 

And if there are going to be lots of interested buyers, maybe 
a dedicated fiber run providing high-speed access to the 
neighborhood isn't a bad idea after all...  :)

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On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 09:01:40 -0600 "Brian Kelsay" <BLKELSAY at kcc.usda.gov>
writes:
> this old man pissing contest broke out on Slashdot and I thought it 
> was hilarious.
> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=88171&cid=7638743
>  
> Well, ol' man, back when I was your age, we didn't 
> have monochrome monitors. We had punch cards, 
> card readers and a line printer. Yessir.

I had a teletype terminal once.  Used up a lot of paper playing
"TradeWars" on local BBSes.

A friend of the family still has a lot of her old programs on punch cards
in her basement (she went to school back when an entire semester at the
University of Kansas only cost $175).

> We had to send smoke signals in through a plastic funnel. 

There's enough distortion in smoke to alter a laser beam enough to create
a crude messaging device similar to a telegraph.  You can transmit a
message using lasers and smoke puffs between campus buildings with a
photoresistor device on the other end.

Beware the second year engineers: they're doing lab experiments on the
speed of light, and they get to check out lab lasers for their
experiments.  Technically, the laser itself never left the building.  

> Our printer was an old man carving output into a tree with a rock.

I nearly got carved up by an old man with a rock when he and I discovered
I had been sending dozens of print jobs to the wrong mainframe printer,
which had been left unsecured for some reason for an entire semester.

> We had Fortran, PL1, Assembler and JCL.

Ahhh, Fortran.  Much more "fun" than BASIC.

Anyone else try to write programs in FORTH?

> We had Onetran, PL0, and French.
> 
> Try 300 baud thru an acoustical coupler.

I did.  Lots of fun.  Wish it was possible to get faster speeds through
an acoustical coupler, as I've run into a few situations on the road when
I'd like to check my E-mail but there's no cell phone service and the pay
phone doesn't have a data jack.

> Try making bleep noises down a piece of string through a tin can. 
> 0.5 baud if the winds were favorable.

Tried hooking up two acoustical couplers together once in college with a
pair of tin cans and a pair of wires stretched across a classroom.  If I
remember right 1 baud was about the speed we registered on the
"luggables" borrowed for the "experiment".

Ahhh, pleasant college days in the Engineering Department.  Borrowing
classroom lasers to try and beam "cheat sheets" directly into classrooms:
if you wore the right pair of laser enhancing glasses, only you could see
the "writing on the wall".  :)  Not that we ever used it to cheat, just
to write hilarious messages on the classroom walls for people "in the
know" to read.

Homemade gunpowder for solid fuel model rocket engines, from a manual in
the reference section in the Engineering Library (and altering a plastic
rock tumbler into a gunpowder mill).  

Homemade napalm that one friend of mine who should have known better
tried to stamp out with his foot (we got his shoe off before his actual
foot got burnt).  

Rewiring the classroom overhead projector with a garage door opener for
hilarious remote on-off results.  

And the nitrogen tri-iodine in the rubber doorknob wall protector: open
the door, slowly swings open, hits the rubber wall
protector...BAM!...door slams shut!  Note for folks with professors with
similarly good senses of humor: nitrogen tri-iodine doesn't work well on
non-porous surfaces such as linoleum.  Note for folks wishing to avoid
fire hazards: don't put nitrogen tri-iodine on curtains.  But hey:
Perfesser said that was Practical Joke Week, so we avoided any serious
problems with campus police.

And methyl blue in the professor's coffee pot...

Ahhh, the days before that stuff would have landed you in jail as a
"student terrorist".  Sigh.

> The IBM 29 card punch weighed more than [100lbs]
> 
> The Sears WonderBox 1900 was so heavy, it needed a special floor. 

I won a mainframe line printer for $1 in a silent auction at KU once. 
Every time I felt cold in the basement computer room I just printed a
document on it.  Since I was living at home at the time, the electric
bills and too many documents printed at 4am soon caught up with me, and
my parents demanded that I scrap it.

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