On 11/23/06, Simon P. Ditner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This seems entirely unreasonable, but I'll put it out there anyways...
I'd like TAUG to have a hardware lab where we can tinker. Does anyone
have some free square feet that could be accessed by our general
membership, or know of some way we could swing that?
I think it sounds like a neat idea.
Could we strike a deal with a community college or something whereby
we provide the equipment and the setup, and their students could play
with it? One downside to that is that the equipment could be abused.
We've had a few phones go bad in the Aastra demo pool just by
accident. If students found out that doing X,Y and Z would fry a
phone, we might come in to find all the phones fried. In a school
lab, anything that _can_ be exploited, _will_ be exploited. Even if
the only gain is DOS or destruction.
I really like the idea, it has great potential. I just wonder how we
would implement it. How would we control who accessed the facility
from TAUG? Would we appoint several wardens or chaperones to
accompany people or authorize them for entry? If we go entirely on an
honour system, it's possible that some sticky fingered person could go
in and relieve us of our equipment.
If this were one of those web based forums, we could say something
like: "You must acquire 500 karma points (or something) before you can
use the lab" That way it's an incentive for people to participate and
contribute and it establishes them as part of the community before
they're given unconditional trust. I'm not sure how that could be
done with the email system unless majordomo put "grant karma (+1)" and
"report a jerk (-1)" links on the bottom of each message, then we
could use a simple php script to keep scores for each person. But now
I'm creating all kinds of work.
Well, this is what happens when I just think 'aloud' in an email.
I'll give it some more thought and I'd like to know what thoughts
everyone else has.
Dave
