Slashback: StarOffice, Antennae, Handiness

Slashback with more on paying royalties for Web standards, Sun's newest office suite, securing your 802.11 network starting with the antenna(e), and another glove.

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.

Comments

Wireless Antennas

[Spootnik]

Now the major problem is the FCC Certs that we must acquire for our antennas. Most of the manufactures will help get the FCC Cert for the Linksys AP, but, when they do it raises the cost by 75-125%. This Cert is mandatory for installation by the end users, due to the current FCC Part 15B rules. As a professional you may have forgotten about this effect. We and several other manufactures are working on getting the FCC to expand the "Certified Components" rule that was made for computer to cover the wLAN antennas. Till they do, the cost isn't going down much.

The antennas you are thinking about are Directional. The antennas needed for access points are omni-directional. We have tried to use small yagis and other semi-directional antennas to only moderate success. The only true good results have been from using GOOD omni-directional antennas. Also, the RP-SMA wont fit on most APs, but, I'm sure we can get the RP-TNC on them cheaper, its a matter of demand. The omni antenna set for the Linksys is a new product, if demand goes up, we can lower prices, if demand stays where it is, the prices stay where they are.

That cute little yagi that Telex makes will make a great client antenna for indoors...

Now, we have been able to acquire a contract with MaxRad to make antennas for us with RP-TNC connectors, FCC Cert, up to 5dbi that will screw onto the back of the access point. This will make a nicer and **cheaper** antenna, but it will not be as good as the dual 6 and 8 sets, but it will make an acceptable "consumer" grade antenna. Don't think we don't evolve, the main reason we started making the Linksys config is due to consumer demand. The Linksys specials are only about 3 weeks old, it takes a little time to get the certs shoved through the FCC! For now, whoever needs a legal antenna set for end user install, we have the commercial grade Linksys antenna sets.

We have been making commercial grade antenna kits and wLAN hardware for some time now. Soon, the 802.11 standard for 5.8ghz will hit the streets, This is going to put most of the consumer gear @ 2.4ghz and the commercial gear @ 5.8ghz, which will have the effect of causing the 2.4ghz antenna prices to go way down.

Another problem is that no matter how cheep we get these antennas, they are always going to be a niche market. Economy of scale isn't going to hit till over 100/week antennas are made, which is an amount almost = to the production of the linksys WAP11.

As a professional, you posted links to antenna sites with antennas ment only for instlation by professionals. You really need to warn people about the FCC issues with this, as most dont even know the diffrence. Big fines await the unknowledgeable...

Re:The XML doesn't work that way

[jazman_777]

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)

You must be a Vi luser, because Emacs can handle _anthing_! Whoops, wrong thread, I'm looking for the Vi vs. Emacs flamefest, can anyone help me out?