One reason that sound Transit data may be mixed in with local is that we do Sound Transit service under contract. Our bus tracking system (CAD AVL) was never designed for this. We are working on a project to replace this software and the new system will be able to differentiate between the two types of service.Glad to help in anyway I can.

Based on what you told me you either live in Pierce County, King County, or Snohomish. I am a supervisor in the IT department for Pierce Transit. One of my staff supports and tends to the needs of the trip planning software. Iâ(TM)m on vacation until Monday but if you send me an email to bcampbell@piercetransit.org. I would love to hear your perspective. Please put slashdot in the email title so I can spot it in horde of email I will have to go through.

If vast quantities of earth need to be extracted to get rare earth metals because they are so dilute, why not recycle old hard drives? If each hard drive has a magnet in it then surely this would be more cost effective?

My hobby is astronomy. We need Woz working for Celestron or Meade. I would get telescopes that are 20" in diameter and cost only a couple hundred bucks. How about space travel as an industry for WOZ? Make it affordable! On the humanitarian note he could work on medical devices. The point is Apple is set company with defined product line-i.e. boring. Use a guy like this for something new not for a company that's over 30 years old.

I don't really see too much value in Facebook. Its nice to keep track of your relatives and friends but it becomes a pain to maintain. I laugh when I hear people at work who actually put effort into their Facebook page-especially since some of them got fired for for what they posted on it. I have my 15 year old daughter put some generic pictures of the family up there and occasionally I answer the friend request. I may be lazy or greedy but Facebook doesn't put money into my pocket so I don't put much effort into it. In fact I see it as a potential liability that can be used against me on the job, or give the general public too much information as to what I am doing. If I am going to post on a website it will be Slashdot or one of the hobby websites that I subscribe to. Now my 15 year old daughter lives for Facebook-this news might affect her. This may be a generational thing. If it is fading I don't see it with the younger set-yet. I wouldn't blame Zuckerberg for cashing out-isn't that what every computer geeks dream is?

Finally some common sense! I was going to write the same thing-you beat me to it! I would provide internet access in the classrooms labs etc-the dorms would be another story. I don't buy the fact that the network cannot be adapted. For several hundred captive "customers" the ISP's would gladly pull fiber into the dorms if they had to. That's if the university couldn't "lease" extra fiber pairs to the ISP's anyway. Again, the dorm students could have the ability to choose from several commercial ISP's. Now to be really compliant the university would have to say "no file sharing on our network", which would consist of the servers and work stations in the classrooms and labs. A simple firewall and some policies (for students and staff) should do nicely. The firewalls could filter out traffic at the port level-relatively easy to adapt to new file sharing techniques. Make the policies real severe just to show the RIA that you mean business. Take this a step further, don't even provide WI-FI to the students in the classrooms but cut a deal with the cell phone companies to provide internet access at a discounted price.The students, if they were smart, wouldn't do file sharing on the universities network anyway, they would do it in their dorm rooms, apartments, or on their private networks-none of which are connected to the university. Another benefit is that the Universities staff can concentrate on providing security for what matters to their "business" instead of being a police force.

I work for a company that stores terabytes of documents. There are two products that do this well EMC's documentum and Microsoft Sharepoint. Pick your poison depending on whom you want to abuse you.

Why would you care about the website? Who is the heck buys high end network gear without first finding out what the warranty is, where the stuff comes from, if it will be covered by the manufacturer and if said gear will work with what you currently have? When you start getting into stuff that is beyond a basic server you usually need to do some checking before signing the PO.

This is a shameless plug for a vendor that has treated me very well. I would contact Great Lakes computers, my representative is named Dani Mora and she does give very competitive pricing. I have purchased almost new servers, SAN parts, network gear, SANS-almost anything that you can think of. http://www.glcomp.com/ Brent Campbell, Olympia WA