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If it helps, several of the IEE documents refer to corrisponding ISO documents, so you might try there.

Since these journals are being reviewed by peers, publishing by such non-profit groups can work. Both the submitter and review wants the highest quality publication since it helps their respective reputations, the reviewer does not need a hugh amount of cash, just enough to cover expensives or pay for the costs of their next paper.

Smaller topics in mathematics, computer science, and physics already have free pre-print services (arXiv.org www.acm.org/dl), and more than a few online peer reviewed publications. These areas have quickly adapted because they already use electronic submissions of "camera-ready" papers in TeX format.

I think the important point is that these speciality publications are for a small community not for a general audience. The numbers are small, and most participates main income comes from elsewhere.

I didn't even say peer2peer once.

As for previous articles on this, IEEE Spectrum ran a story on this in January. If you have an IEEE account (or know someone who does) then you can see it here. This is a short "news in brief" style of article, but it still does a reasonable job of explaining the effect. The thrust of the article was actually about the potential use of this effect in semiconductor lithography (used for printing ICs).

Spectrum also references the original paper on this effect, which appeared in Physical Review Letters last October. This paper was written by John Pendry from the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College, London, UK. His work was preceded by David Smith and Sheldon Schultz at the University of California when they built some of this so-called left-handed material using a "metamaterial". In fact, the theoretical background for left-handed material has been around since 1968 when the Russian physicist Victor Veselago first looked at it.

So this material has been around for a little while now. You just have to know the right places to look. :-)

No, 802.11B is also an ethernet variant. It is _not_ the same thing as BT. (Yeah, I realise that the CNN page say so, but if the PR department on Microsoft can't get it right then why should CNN?)

What you are looking for is 802.15. That is a "Personal Area Network" thingy by IEEE.

Remember, BT is not aimed at wireless connections it is aimed at "wireless wires" so to speak. The wires that hook your mouse and keyboard to your 'puter. Or the IR link from a remote to a VCR. (Well, the latter is mostly overkill, but the principle is the same.)

IEEE 802.1 describes standards for maintence and internetworking of IEEE 802 networks, i.e. spanning tree, VLAN tagging, access control, etc.

IEEE 802.11 describes Wireless LAN standards.

IEEE 802.15 defines Wireless Personal Area Networks based on Bluetooth v1.1. There is a coexistence task group (TG2) that is defining Collaborative and Non-collaborative mechanisms for information interchange between the WPANs and WLANs.

So now the questions is "why do we need both?" The answer is that WPANs and WLANs solve different problems. WPANs need to be cheap, easy to configure, and very short range. WLANs, on the other hand, should be comparable in range and complexity to a traditional wired LAN.

There is room for both approachs, just as there is room for both ethernet (802.3) and token-ring (802.5) LAN technologies.

Both are international, and both have strong areas of their respective organizations who are politically and socially active.

See their websites (and particularly public policy areas) at

IEEE Main

IEEE Policy Pages

ACM Main site

ACM Public Policy Pages

In a word, "what?" As in, what are people thinking when the write tirades *against* open standards bodies for computing technology?

Here are some that have worked, and made your lives a whole lot better:

RFCs
POSIX/IEEE
HTTP/HTML
ASCII/ISO 8859
ANSI C

And that's just to name a few that immediately came to mind. Note that some of them had coporate sponsorship, some are truly community reviewed, and some are a mixture. But standards are essential for ever moving *beyond* the technology of today. If we didn't have a standard C, then people will still be arguing over how to improve C, rather than creating new languages.

Really, standards shouldn't evolve that much. And people shouldn't wait to get them perfect. Agree on something that mostly works, use it, and move on.

Yeah, 802.11a works at ~ 5.4ghz and is capable of upto 54mbps, HyperLAN2 also has similar speeds and works at 5ghz, both use OFDM radio encoding, however the MAC layer differs between the standards.

Four people are credited with designing the 4004: Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.

There are evidently bad feelings between Faggin and Hoff because Faggin feels he did all of the real work, and Hoff got much of the credit. Many accounts do not give Shima any credit, only giving credit to the three Intel engineers (Shima was an engineer at Busicom, a Japanese calculator company at the time, and later became an Intel engineer).

Interview with Shima (extremely interesting and detailed)

Another interview with Shima

Interview with Hoff

An e-mail from Mazor, and nice pictures of the 4004

A really nice picture of the 4004

A picture of three of the engineers (no Shima) years later

A picture of all four engineers

Federico Faggin's initials on the 4004 -- the only initials on the chip

Okay, the only place I could find a soft copy of this is a zip of a word document - sorry, but here's the link
-Alison

There is a set of established code of ethics for computer professionals, at least for those who are members of IEEE or ACM.

IEEE Code of Ethics
ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
ACM/IEEE Computer Society Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice

cb

In other words, that certification should be handled by a group that is not beholden to a particular company's technologies or "vision".

Groups like the IEEE and NCEES have long had these professional standards and certifications in place for real engineers, but unfortunately most IT professional fall in a gray area between vo-tech and engineering. I'm not saying that IT jobs are "easier" or less intellectually demanding than jobs that required old-school degreed engineers -- rather, the extreme market forces of the last five years have force many, many smart people to bail out of their college degree track and go for the gold.

Because of that, these organizations are finding that lots of IT professionals are not being educated on the responsibilities of the technical professional, include in particular ethical responsibilities. A whole raft of talent is set adrift ...

For a professional engineer, this topic is a no-brainer: as a consultant, you must act in the best interest of your paying customer.

To see it in black and white, read the short and simple IEEE Code of Ethics.

I'm not aware of any ethical guidelines for computing - it's mainly a case of individual corporations embracing ethical guidelines. Every engineering society that I know of has a set of ethical guidelines, however. Here's the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC's code of ethics and here's the IEEE code of ethics. (#s 2 and 7 would apply in this case if you were using these guidelines, #s 3,4,7, and 9 would apply from the APEG code) As far as your case go, the particulars are very important to determining whether you are ethically bound to speaking out.

Here are some things to look out for:

• Long-term disability won't pay for the first 30 days or 60 days or whatever is specified in the contract. To cover the first 30 or 60 days you would need either accured vacation/sick leave, savings, short-term disability insurance, or some combination thereof.
• If you pay for disability insurance with pre-tax dollars and you become disabled, you have to pay income tax on your disability check. If you pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars, your disability check is tax-free.
• The maximum benefit for disability is usually 60% of your pay (for the past year) per year, to provide a disincentive to claiming disability to induced chronic fatigue or something. Thus, if possible, you want to pay for disability insurance with after-tax dollars so that the benefit will be about the same as your current take-home pay.
• If your employer offers disability insurance, I believe there is something that prevents you from buying disability insurance on your own, but I don't know what it is, whether it is a law, a tax disincentive, or an underwriter policy.
• Disability insurance doesn't pay past age 65, so make sure you get enough coverage so that you can still contribute to your IRA with your disability benefit check.
• Policies vary widely in what consider a disability and what benefits they will pay out and whether you're allowed to make some money on your hobby when you're disabled. Some policies (like those $10/month policies offered by most employers) will try to make you flip burgers if you at all can, and then say you're not disabled and not pay anything. That's why if you're serious about disability insurance you have to go to a Cadillac $100/month policy -- not many insurance companies offer good policies anymore, but Minnesota Life still does. Also, if you've been a member of IEEE for a while, you're eligible for their Financial Advantage Program group policies. Their disability insurance is almost as good as Minnesota Life's.
• Look for automatic inflation adjustment of benefits.
• You will have a choice between "level payments" and payments that increase as you get older. Since most of us aspire to early retirement and financial independence, get the latter of course, so you can simply cancel when you reach that point and not have wasted any money.
• Disability insurance is cheaper if you can get two or three buddies to do it with you. You can save 10-20% this way.
• The amount you pay depends on your profession. Some dangerous or high-risk professions don't qualify at all. So for a programmer, not only has the insurance company taken into account the possibility of carpal tunnel, but also brain damage, automobile accidents, etc. In other words, you're not a special case -- they've done this before. A supermodel insuring her legs is a unique case. A programmer insuring his hands is not -- it's simply disability insurance.

Naturally we shouldn't be overly concerned that Athena doesn't meet a "proven" (here, POSIX) standard--we aren't all using FORTRAN or writing real-time [deterministic-time] algorithms, are we?--, but shouldn't we take a moment to consider the fact that Athena's FAQ says:
["Does the Pandora Engine support POSIX compliancy?"]
"No. It's not practical, or even possible to implement most of the POSIX standard" (my bold)
because:
"POSIX was designed for procedural systems, so given that the Pandora Engine is object based..."
Now, it is of course a Good Thing (for easy, modular programming) to have a heavily OOP'd, high-level 'environment', (we can't even say OS anymore[1]) that can easily optimize later whatever tasks it does allow the application to run. However, the fact should worry us that the developers say it is not "possible" to run functions on a low enough level to ensure any kind of guaranteed (or "realtime" :) operational behavior on ANY level of what you're doing...short of writing bits out to a file (but you're getting nowhere near the FS--or any hardware for that matter). Forget HAL: this is HAL:THISMACHINE:HARDWARE:PERIPHERALS:OUTPUT:VISIBL E:MONITORS:ENVIRONMENT:WINDOWS:MYWINDOW:PLEASE:PRE TTY:PLEASE:LET:ME:NEAR:A:SET:METHOD(&MyAthenaApp.m ywindow.mypallette.color, GREEN); Not that this isn't useful, but what if their idea of green isn't your idea of green? Just dig around the standard, right, it's bound to be there somewhere?
"Pandora does not use a separate interface for game development (such as a DirectX style API)"..."Currently we are missing 3D support (OpenGL for example)"...Hmmmm...correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that their "object based" methods are the only things programmers will have available, without even the Standardizd (eg OpenGL) niceties we can use to get around protected architectures once they're implemented?
Oh well: "there are plenty of existing engines that can be ported when the need for a 3D engine arises."
But I wonder...does "can be ported" mean "We can't exactly use them, because of how commercial we are, and we're not allowed to port GNU stuff, but, we assure you, we'll have really, really similar-sounding naming schemes..." ;-)
Anyone see a different take on this?

[1] Athena on BeOs on WIN2K on Linux??? Oh the thngs we do. :)

Personally, I'd much rather see all pager and cellphone traffic moved to its own "area code", meaning that to dial those numbers, you'd need 10 digits, and everything else (copper-wire-connected) that is "local" only use 7 digits. It may make matters interesting if you want to call from a cell phone to a local number - you'd only want to use 7 digits - but I'm sure those Eletrical and Electronic Engineering wizards could easily cook up a switching system.

--

Talking about cute names for things, did you notice one of the modules is called the Zenith Integrated Truss Structure? They're having so much trouble getting all the blemishes out, because the space station has ZITS!

Maybe the satellite has special shielding or something, but there's enough wired connections down here on the ground that you can probably, for the most part, only use wireless to get a couple miles to the base station/cell tower/802.3 (# correct?) hub.

Thats IEEE 802.11b (aka wavelan) you're thinking about. IEEE 802.3 is Ethernet, IIRC. And what you call a hub is normally refered to as an access point, although they are similar in function. They're not equivalent, though, even if you don't count the wireless part (duh!). Access points usually include a router and nifty features such as NAT and DHCP.

Are Mobile Phones Safe?

summarised all of the research into biological effects of mobile phones. The conclusion was that the studies have been going long enough to measure the risk of increased cancer from mobile phone use. However, the stated that given the current data it must be less that 2 times increase and maybe no effect whatsoever. Quoting the article

The epidemiological results, so far, are certainly inconsistent with any large increase in risk (a doubling or more) of brain cancer from use of cell phones

Now your LAN systems are shorter range, thus lower power, and you're not going to hold your LAN card against your head while its in use. So I think we can safely say the risks from WaveLAN cards are minimal

D.

What reforms would you like to see made in the H1B visa program?

Many companies depend on the H1B visa program to satisfy their need for tech workers. Several problems have been identified with the current H1B visa program. A September 2000 report by the GAO documents the massive expansion in the H1B program, and concludes that better controls are needed. Organizations such as the IEEE have provided recommendations to reform the current process.

I am interested in your view as to what problems you see in the H1B visa program, and steps you would take to correct them.

You know, Sony seems to have a real problem grasping the concept of standdard formats. Witness the Betamax, 8MM video, and now the Memory Stick. What's really weird/ironic is that they're partnering with Phillips, a company famous for giving away the analog audio cassette patent -- and driving out a lot of competing formats in the process.

The above link is broken because Slashdot insists on munging the following url:
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/o ral_histories/transcripts/drabek.html

__________

Importing the best and brightest is probably the only way for the US to maintain dominance in intellectual business.

I've considered immigrating to the US through employer sponsorship and have studied the US immigration process for well over two years now. The best and brightest people will proabably do the same and draw similar conclusions to mine before considering coming to the US -- that the immigration system is all one big lottery.

Look at one particularly famous hi-tech immigrant. A Mr. Linus Torvalds, whose H1-B is sponsored by Transmeta. Fortunately for him, his Green Card application is going through a faster route. He's qualified for EB-1 (Employment Based category one) which allows him to forego the lengthy Labor Certification process which would've added at least two years wait. And yet still, Linus complains. The IEEE-USA and Immigration Reform Coalition have even gotten him to sign their letter in support of green cards for new immigrant labor.

What about those H1-B holders whose GC applications don't qualify for EB-1. The EB-2 for jobs requiring a Masters, or the heavily over subscribed EB-3 for any job needing only a bachelors? Waiting times for: Labor Certification + Priority date to become current + i485 processing + Employment Approval Document(EAD) + final ajustment of status to GC holder = in excess of 5 years. Assuming an H1-B is renewed it can only allow a person to work for 6 years in the US.

Technically, once an H1-B holder has reached the EAD stage they can remain in the US indefinitely on their current visa working for the sponsoring employer. The adjustment of status queue itself (the one Linus is currently stuck in) has been bottlenecked for well over a year. Indefinite indentured labor anyone?

And in the space of just 1 year look what has happened to the dot coms. Layoffs, pink slips, bankruptcy. Even well established companies like Shockwave, Qwest and Novell are laying off hi-tech people. Of course, with the labor market so tight, the US citizens and residents will get snapped up by other more successful companies within a weeks. But what of the H1-B holder who now has ten days to find another sponsor or be deported? Even if one is so lucky as to find a new sponsor for the H1-B, the 6 year time limit cannot be reset. 2 years spent at a dot.bomb means only 4 years left at the new company. The GC application must start from scratch, and there simply will not be enough time for it to complete processing.

And even if all the bottlenecks were to magically disappear by noon today, a recent IEEE-USA study suggests that the quota of H1-B's (65,000, or 200,000 if the cap is raised) entering every year would render the Green card process one big lottery for many. Only a tiny fraction of H1-B holders get adjusted to GC in any given year. This number was no more than 25,000 in 1998 due to all the backlogs.

So, No thank you. I don't think I'll be working in the U.S. Maybe, I'll try Canada. From what I hear, a hi-tech professional can get residency within 18 months. Many former H1-B holders from India are migrating northwards taking valuable US hi-tech experience with them.

Well, since there really is no hi-tech shortage in the US, this Computing Science Ph.D. who can program in C/C++, Perl, Java, Python, Tcl/Tk, is familiar with many Internet protocols, OpenGL programming, and gives training courses in Linux/UNIX, will probably not be missed.

Bye

Briefly, in one study of 250000 cell phone subscribers they found no mortality difference between hand held cell phone use and automobile mounted cell phones (hand helds have the transmitter close to your head, car mounted have them further away). They went a bit further and looked for a correlation between duration of cell phone use and mortality and did find one: use of a cell phone while driving did result in more accidents.

Animal studies where they were subjected to radiation of the frequency and modulation of cell phone also yielded no correlation between cell phone usage and cancer.

Read the article though, its pretty good (as Spectrum usually is)

It was because companies were making the university's research into closed-source, proprietary software of which redistribution was forbidden.

Which was quite contrary to the goals of a university, and open research. Which is happening (again, on a larger scale) now.

What do we do?

Do what Stallman did. Work to feed ourselves, yes, but only participate in open research in the universities. Walk away from a bad situation. Don't end up like the guy in Florida (*) who was imprisoned and put on an chain-gang (!) for "stealing" his own work. (which some company claimed rights to). Most of us here are NOT poor, we have choices.

Freedom and a Pentium II, or slavery and a quad Pentium III, it is quite distressing how many of us will take the second option.

(*) He is Petr Taborsky, more info can be found here: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/INST/jun97/student.ht ml. According to that article, he is now a convicted felon. I.E. he has lost some legal rights under law for the rest of his life. Keep that in mind for those of you that think the intellectual property law isn't dangerous.

4. stabilization. Even quite a short (100m) tether will be stabilized by Earth's tidal forces and can be used to keep a satellite pointed in a certain way

Most satellites must be kept in a certain attitude to perform correctly, and lots of effort is put into maintaining this attitude. The real expenses start to build as you try to create an ever-more precise system. But if you hang a mass from a line, gravity gradients will pull the line straight down, orienting the satellite.

Gravity gradient: gravity depends on distance [F=G*m1*m2/(r^2) with 'm1' & 'm2' being the Earth and the orbiting stuff in this case, and 'r' being the distance between the centers of mass of the two objects], so the closer you are to the Earth, the more gravity you feel. Not a whole lot more, but there aren't a whole lot of other forces acting on your satellite. So a few kilograms on the end of a line (100m -> 1000m) should straighten your satellite out. This is great for communications satellites: they must face the center of the Earth for best performance, and that is exactly what a tether does for you.

The author of the NASA tether article alludes to that in this section, saying, in part,

Once the rocket's stage and the tether's end mass are far enough apart, the difference in the gravitational force at the two locations will in effect pull the objects apart. Eventually, the tether will be vertical with respect to Earth.

"Where do you want to go ...

They just saw some reporter claiming an small, unsupported study found an extremely weak link between power lines and some disease.

I think you should take a look at the most recent issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine. The "Speakout" section for July 2000 contains an article on exactly this subject.

Unfortunately, the online version is restricted to IEEE members, but here's a quick synopsis:

• Microwave researcher (J. R. Ashley) sees 1979 and 1988 Denver, CO and 1991 LA county studies linking HV power-distribution-induced magnetic fields with childhood leukemia. Thinks researchers are full of crap since there's essentially no correlation between wire distance/geometry ("wire codes") and magnetic fields.
• Said researcher then sees 1992 Swedish study that shows 5x leukemia risk for kids living within 50 meters of HV power lines. This study apparently has a high number of cases and controls, and good statistical confidence.
• Said researcher asks self, <emeril>"Self! Why this link between childhood leukemia and HV wire codes?"</emeril> Realizes that prior studies never looked at peak electric fields near study areas.
• Said researcher goes to Denver, and measures peak E and H fields. Finds no correlation between distance and H field, but "fair" correlation between distance and E field. He then calculates peak current density on various regions on the body due to E and H fields, and finds that "current density induced in the ankles by the electric field is 2-10 times greater than the current density induced in the skin of the torso by the magnetic field, depending on distance from the supply substation."

So this guy recommends looking at peak E fields outside homes near HV power lines, and also looking at areas near lower-voltage (66kV to 230kV) lines that interconnect US substations. He also recommends trying to recreate E-field data from the Denver and LA studies using power company records.

Interesting stuff, and certainly not to be brushed off without a modicum of thought.

(BTW, you'll note that nowhere above do I say that HV lines cause cancer, merely that there's an interesting statistical link. Ashley is careful to do the same in his article, pointing out simply that we really don't know what, if any, causative process is going on -- we just don't have enough knowledge to answer the question yet.)

They just saw some reporter claiming an small, unsupported study found an extremely weak link between power lines and some disease.

I think you should take a look at the most recent issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine. The "Speakout" section for July 2000 contains an article on exactly this subject.

Unfortunately, the online version is restricted to IEEE members, but here's a quick synopsis:

• Microwave researcher (J. R. Ashley) sees 1979 and 1988 Denver, CO and 1991 LA county studies linking HV power-distribution-induced magnetic fields with childhood leukemia. Thinks researchers are full of crap since there's essentially no correlation between wire distance/geometry ("wire codes") and magnetic fields.
• Said researcher then sees 1992 Swedish study that shows 5x leukemia risk for kids living within 50 meters of HV power lines. This study apparently has a high number of cases and controls, and good statistical confidence.
• Said researcher asks self, <emeril>"Self! Why this link between childhood leukemia and HV wire codes?"</emeril> Realizes that prior studies never looked at peak electric fields near study areas.
• Said researcher goes to Denver, and measures peak E and H fields. Finds no correlation between distance and H field, but "fair" correlation between distance and E field. He then calculates peak current density on various regions on the body due to E and H fields, and finds that "current density induced in the ankles by the electric field is 2-10 times greater than the current density induced in the skin of the torso by the magnetic field, depending on distance from the supply substation."

So this guy recommends looking at peak E fields outside homes near HV power lines, and also looking at areas near lower-voltage (66kV to 230kV) lines that interconnect US substations. He also recommends trying to recreate E-field data from the Denver and LA studies using power company records.

Interesting stuff, and certainly not to be brushed off without a modicum of thought.

(BTW, you'll note that nowhere above do I say that HV lines cause cancer, merely that there's an interesting statistical link. Ashley is careful to do the same in his article, pointing out simply that we really don't know what, if any, causative process is going on -- we just don't have enough knowledge to answer the question yet.)

Also the Alpha interpreter is much more efficient that the x86,
according to this IEEE Spectrum article which was posted on Slashdot a couple of months ago.

In the short run, I think Transmeta have a hard fight on their
hands just to survive. The Spectrum article hints that Transmeta were
disappointed at the results they reported at Crusoe's unveiling, that
they had expected a real showstopper. In the long run, I am convinced
that this is a much, much better way to design processors.

but.... I likemy teflon pan.... and although I think that plastic is used stupidly (why give me something that is permanent for a use that is obviously temporary???) HDPE can be wonderful stuff! Hey, did I mention that my local electric company just yesterday started offering solar power?

But don't trust me, I'm just some geek in an over-air-conditioned room.... read what the ieee thinks about the benefits we got, get and will continue to get from ye olde space programme

The disappointing thing about cases like this is that the software professionals who write these programs apparently don't consider ethical behavior to be a priority.

The ACM and the IEEE consider user privacy to be so important that it appears in their joint Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice in a number of places, to wit:

3.12. Work to develop software and related documents that respect the privacy of those who will be affected by that software.

3.13. Be careful to use only accurate data derived by ethical and lawful means, and use it only in ways properly authorized.

Furthermore, management (i.e. Mattel) is admonished to:

5.11. Not ask a software engineer to do anything inconsistent with this Code.

5.12. Not punish anyone for expressing ethical concerns about a project.

So why do products like this keep appearing? I realize that just because something's unethical doesn't make it illegal, but still... it's dismaying, to say the least.

Some info from this month's IEEEspectrum

I can't find a link to prove it, but I'm pretty sure that the 700 Mhx chip had Windows-specific optimizations while the 400Mhz (while not specifically optimized for Linux) was intended for Linux use.

The "Windows-specific" optimizations (according to IEEE Spectrum is merely support for the 16-bit operations. Apparently (a) Windows still has a ton of 16-bit code in performance critical areas, and (b) nobody at Transmeta realised it before their first CPU (the article said they were pretty much all Unix heads).

I find it a little supprising that they didn't do a better job of checking the dyanmic instruction mix of popular OSes and applications (maybe using bochs) before spinning Si, but what the hell.

In any even the 400Mhz CPU will run Windows (or anything else a x86 CPU can run), and so can the 700Mhz chip. It's just when running Linux (or any all 32bit OS) more of hte transistors of the 700Mhz part will go to waste, and while running Windows the 400Mhz CPU will spend more time in the slow part of the emulator...

The real story here, though, is that the DVDCA's central complaint is fraudulent. DVD encryption does nothing to prevent content piracy. A pirate doesn't have to know how to decode DVDs to make bit-for-bit copies of them by the thousands. And no DVD player can distinguish between a legally distributed original and a pirated bit-for-bit copy. The amount of protection content producers get from DVD is exactly zero.

We have gotten some mail contesting Eric's claim that it is not necessary to decrypt DVDs to be able to make illegal copies. In fact, as documented in this IEEE Spectrum article, a number of steps have been taken to make bit-for-bit copying of DVDs hard - including prerecording sections of blank disks so that the encryption key can not be copied onto them.

None of that changes the fundamental point, though: pirates determined to make illegal DVD copies will be able to do so without any need for the DeCSS software. Subverting a (hardware or software) player to get a clear bit stream, or finding a source of non-prerecorded disks are both entirely viable approaches. Trying to protect bits that are in the hands of users is a losing battle.

Well, since my submission has been rejected from the queue, I might as well post this link here, in a relevant topic:

Transmeta's magic show

software that conforms to the Linux API generally conforms to the Unix API (sorry, I meant the UNIX® Operating System's Application Programming Interface).

"UNIX® system API" would be fine by the Open Group (they just want a noun after the trademark), but I think I realized (looking at it from an API perspective) that the UNIX system API is just the POSIX API. Checking the Patent Office's trademark search engine, I find that POSIX® is a registered trademark of IEEE. I didn't see any off-the-wall trademark guidelines on IEEE's web site.

Something else that occurred to me on this point is that those of us who are members of the IEEE and other standards-establishing organizations should be lobbying for all future official standards to be free of patents. That includes things like Firewire, etc. It might have a chilling effect on submissions for standards for awhile, but the current system of "submit it as a standard then ambush everyone with patent demands after the fact" would be defeated.

Posssibly not (although The Mac crowd has its fair share of hackers, both hardware and software based). What you need to remember, though, is that AirPort technology is 802.11-based. This means that the technology should work for other wireless cards, including Lucent's WaveLan cards.

As an answer to a previous post, the original article menations that the author found that the hack was legal in New Zealand (where he is based), and believes that the same requirements go in the States, as well.

Leave it to the FCC, though, to find a way to make it illegal.

What I would really like to see is affordable WaveLan/Airport-like Internet access sold like cell phone access. ("For $19.95/month - unlimited dial-up. For $29.95/month, unlimited wireless access. For $29.95/month - unlimited cell phone access.")

I suppose that will happen the day that xDSL-like technologies are actually affordable.

The IEEE and ACM are two organizations that get involved in public policy matters. The IEEE has the Computer Society for people interested in computer hardware and software.

Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.

Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.

The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...

Just my 5 eurocents...
Johan.

Here's some good websites over at IEEE.

IEEE 802.11 -- Wireless LAN Working Group

IEEE 802.16 -- Broadband Wireless Access Working Group

Here's some good websites over at IEEE.

IEEE 802.11 -- Wireless LAN Working Group

IEEE 802.16 -- Broadband Wireless Access Working Group

Here's some good websites over at IEEE.

IEEE 802.11 -- Wireless LAN Working Group

IEEE 802.16 -- Broadband Wireless Access Working Group

Bluetooth is a newer addition to the wireless space, and comes closer to satisfying WPAN requirements.

So BlueTooth does NOT satisfy the requirements of the IEEE 802.11 standard. From what I hear it only operates at 1 Mbps whereas already available wireless technology from Lucent and Apple, among others, operate at 11 Mbps over greater distances.

BT does seem to be just a marketing initiative. I'm going to look into it further and get back with more info.

Btw, the above is a very good link: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/WPAN-FAQ .htm

Apparently these new iron memories would change in one clock cycle, but would then hold the state. (I can't recall the exact details of how it works, it was too late when I read it last night.) I got the impression that it could be used like EEPROM or flash-EEPROM, except sufficiently fast and inexpensive to be used for main memory.

As far as I know, this is bullshit. The site you are referring to is the openDVD journalist reference page. They say:

"However, as this letter clearly shows, the encryption only hinders playback. It is possible to (illegally) copy a DVD disk without decrypting anything! You can do this because the decryption is done at play time and doesn't have anything to do with copying."

Note that the IEEE article on DVD says:

"This is done by pre-embossing (or in the case of write-once DVD-R media, factory pre-recording) the sector reserved for the DVD-Video or DVD-Audio disc decryption keys. As a result, the recordable blank cannot record a copy of the disc decryption key associated with a bit-by-bit copy's transfer of content, and while the copy itself is not prevented, it is impossible to play back."

That is, titlekeys are written to static *unwritable* location(s). Rick Moen (the person referenced by the opendvd site) says that the linked email 'was not fully informed' , but that he's come across other points to support the defense.

I think it's pretty irresponsible of the opendvd people to knowingly (this assumes they read their feedback email account) misrepresent the facts in this way -- especially to the media.

Note that I've only just started looking into this so I may be wrong -- please feel free to correct me.

.c

I'm getting off topic, I suppose, but Legos aren't the only platform where FORTH is available and you are not going to waste your time learning it.

Versions, free and commercial, exist for any Unix with GCC, DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, the Palm Pilot, and dozens of microcontrollers. Did you know that FORTH is part of the Open Firmware provided in the Sun and the PowerMac boot proms? (Note IEEE requires a subscription, so check out Sun's OpenFirmware page)

The experience on one platform transfers well to another and there is lots to like about FORTH, especially when dealing with an environment with exceedingly limited resources in comparison to a PC.

This list of FORTH implementations by platform is a little dated but should point in the right direction.

This search at IEEE.org yields all of the draft specifications for the protocol, but there does not appear to be an 802.11.org. :)

This search at IEEE.org yields all of the draft specifications for the protocol, but there does not appear to be an 802.11.org. :)