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Slashback: StarOffice, Antennae, Handiness
Fewer excuses for the "memos and shopping lists" crowd. Sean Lamb writes: "Now that everyone's done slashdotting Sun's servers, I've posted an Out-Of-Box-Experience review of StarOffice 6.0 beta over at Linux Orbit."
Some things just want to be Free. Bruce Perens writes: "HP has made a public statement supporting royalty-free web standards and urging the community to write W3C with their opinion. "
A document on Perens' web site outlines Hewlett-Packard's response to the ongoing discussion of allowing technologies into W3C standards which could require patents on the so-called Reasonable and Non-Discrimatory (RAND) basis. That document reads in part:
"Agreement on royalty-free standards does not end this discussion. The licensing of patents embedded in standards must be compatible with the GPL license that is applied to the Linux operating system kernel, the MIT-derived license that is applied to the Apache web server, and a number of other software licenses. Because of the many thousands of copyright holders who have already contributed to existing products under those licenses, those software licenses can not be changed - the patent licensing mandated by W3C standards must accommodate them."I hope other companies benefiting from software like Apache, Linux, and any other software which could be hurt by royalty-based standards make similar statements.
Wardrivers, begone. Moshe Barr may have laid out how to share a network connection with the neighborhood, but what about when you don't want to or can't afford to? trevmar writes: "BYTE.com has just published an article I wrote about WLAN antennas -- how they work and how to choose them. Hopefully I have put in all the stuff you will need to know whether you are setting up a community freenet, or just want to make your own home network harder to hack. If you are hardware inclined, I also describe some low cost hardware, and an access point that can be pulled apart very easily and resoldered at will ..."
Need an integrated keyboard here ... Adrian writes "Forget the guys with the glove from Berkeley, check out these guys -- they have a great product that interfaces with 3D Max for realtime animation generation that is on the market and won best of SIGGRAPH a couple of years back -http://www.didjiglove.com.au" While that's nice, I'd rather not forget the Berkeley guys just yet, since their seems like a more generalized concept.
There are several on the market now. Check here for some:
Motion Capture Hardware
Or how about a whole bodysuit:
Body Suit
The IEEE is making all the 802 standards available for free on their web site. Have a look at http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ for details.
From this page it seems both Apple and Kodak claim to have patents covering SVG.
The author of the StarOffice article is a bit off base about how the XML works. Basically, the document consists of SEVERAL XML documents, images, and fonts all packed into a JAR file (a ZIP file with a maifest file). After you extract these files, you then find that each of these XML documents contains so much info that it makes them nearly impossible to be read by humans! (No VI or EMACS, sorry)
The upshot of this is that KOffice or some other suite could support these documents very easily. On top of that, the compression makes these files tremendously small. I took a 700K Word document (500 pages!) and converted it to a 100K StarOffice file. Now if that isn't cool, I dunno what is!
You can find more info at http://xml.openoffice.org/.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
To summarise, the names of the committee are on the report. It doesn't, HP/Perens say, that the individual committee members agree with the report. The take is that Peterson was opposed to the idea....
Spootnik, interested to hear your comments about the FCC certification needed for antennae. Would be interested to see more about that. We have also been making commercial grade antennae (see http://www.aerialscience.com ). There haven't been any such regulatory problems in Australasia.
Regarding access points, you can use sectorial antennae for access points, not just omnis. That way you can connect more clients. We're getting 10dB (12 dBi) from our omni and 16dB from a 120 sectorial and 25dB from a 450mm solid dish. The thing to watch out for with many yagi or co-linear omnis is that they aren't actually omni-directional. We don't use that technology so the omnis are omni-directional.
Cheers, Don Anderson
(I already left a message in the thread above, describing the construction of the sleeve)
There is no dispute that a vertical monopole over a horizontal infinite ground should be described as a monopole. The radiation pattern consists of that from the monopole added to that from the reflection of the monopole in the ground plane.
If the ground plane is reduced to several 1/4 wave radials then it is still a ground plane, although the current distribution in the radials will be different from that in the infinite ground. We still have a monopole
As the radials are folded downwards to become a sleeve, additional currents flow in the coax sheath. When the radials are flush with the sheath the velocity factor of the sheath comes into play in deciding the distribution of those currents.
So, do we have a dipole with a novel feed, or do we have a monopole with a coaxial balun, but without a groundplane?
Hmmm...
Trevor
ex VK5ZTM
It's only slightly offtopic... OpenOffice 638c (latest build) is probably pretty close to StarOffice 6beta.
The other day, I downloaded OpenOffice build 638C for Linux and for Windows. I use Red Hat Linux (7.1) at home, and I already use StarOffice (5.2) for my regular office needs. It works great. I think my main complaint with OpenOffice is the silly desktop. Other than that, I consider it a fully functional office suite that can replace my MS Office needs anytime.
I didn't see any cool OpenOffice screenshots, so I made my own of the text document program. I didn't do any (yet?) of the spreadsheet program, or presentation software. These were really captured for the benefit of my brother, but I'm posting them here so that others can see them.
Install it with the -net option. This installs the program in a central place and allows for multiuser use (even across a network) (~200MB).
Then run setup as each user you want to be able to use SO (see install guide). This will install a local SO directory in the user's $HOME, with config filers, etc. (~2 MB)
Now each user can run SO with their own settings, without installing all ~200MB in each user's $HOME
Your advice regarding disassembling a piece of equipment, removing its integral antenna, and soldering on an SMA connector is poor. The engineer who designs such a piece of equipment is free to choose any impedance for the antenna and RF power amplifier. (Note for Slashdot audience: When the antenna is removable, it is conventional to use the standard 50 ohm impedance. There are numerous catalogs full of 50 ohm connectors, cables, filters, pads, amplifiers, detectors, etc. There's nothing magic about 50 ohms, it's a pure convenience issue. Like using RJ45s for Ethernet.) The design process is often easier, and the resulting circuit cheaper, if the engineer uses an electrically-convenient impedance instead of being a slave to 50 ohms. Your 50 ohm cable stands a good chance of creating an unacceptable VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio, a measure of the power being reflected back into the amplifier). This can destroy the amplifier or cause distortion, and distortion will get the FCC chasing you. At the very least, I'd cut the RF section off of one and hook it up to a good RF network analyzer and make sure the impedance is 50 ohms. (Network analyzers cost on the order of $1,000/month to rent, or $20k+ to buy, so this isn't a casual thing.)
It gets worse: when integral antennas are used, the engineer may design the amplifier to only work correctly when that antenna is connected. Since the antenna is permanently soldered to the amplifier, the engineer doesn't need to make the amplifier as robust, which saves money and design time. When a load with the wrong impedance is connected, such an amplifier can oscillate wildly at pretty much any frequency. A 2.4GHz amplifier could easily oscillate at any frequency from a few megahertz to 10GHz. In fact it is eminently possible for the oscillation to occur only during key up/down and quiet down at full power, so it might seem to work while spewing all sorts of RF garbage before and after the transmission slot. This sort of thing makes the FCC *very unhappy* and will earn you a visit from some rather humorless government inspectors.
It gets even worse: you are soldering a cable to a board that was not intended to have such a cable. The board may very well (in fact, probably does for cheap commodity equipment) have an electronic noise problem. The board itself is only a few inches wide, and thus is an inefficient antenna, but several feet of extra cable can make a good dipole and cause the noise to radiate. If I was building a couple of these for my personal use I wouldn't worry too much, but if I was doing it for commercial purposes I'd definitely recertify the board + new cable combination (which costs thousands of dollars).
I would recommend a course of study in practical radio circuit design, and a thorough review of government RF regulations, before you give further advice about soldering random cables to random undocumented wideband amplifiers.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.