Re:slow down
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
All he needs to do is ensure that upon a sideways fall, it will roll to where a wheel has grip. Then, running the wheel at full power can flip it onto its back (or front) where it can right itself again using quick reflexes and a little angular momentum.
The easy idea would be to place some sort of hemisphere on the outside rims of the wheels so that an unattached wheel would roll to its side. You'd also have to place some extension to the left and right at the top to prevent the unit from lying flat. As long as only one edge of the tire gripped the ground, rotating the tire at high speed in one direction or another should (messily) jerk/flip the unit in a position from which it can recover. (It should be less force than a fall at any rate)
The final piece of the puzzle would be to add some type of sensor that allows you to discern your angular orientation with respect to the ground. One or more accelerometers would be sufficient for this.
This is never going to amount to a mass of anything (save vapor) if it's not applied as a standard and supported in hardware. G.721, G.729, GSM, and aLaw and uLaw are pretty established codec's that in supporting, you can communicate with probalby 99% of VoIP equipment out there....
It's very sad that speex will never make it as a viable codec for VoIP. Perhaps it would be beneficial for an orginasation such as the FSF to support these open sourc codec's efforts to lobby and apply for standards support so that future products might actually use them one day -- epseically in an application such as VoIP where interoperability is often the number one concern in establishing large scale acceptance.
> That's the whole point, my friend, this will be the only way to broadcast. Either you buy the equipment from iBiquity, pay for the maintenance contracts, etc., or you don't broadcast.
I happen to think that BMW is "the only way to drive" but that doesn't mean there isn't room for other cars on the road. The receiving radios still get analog FM. That's the whole point of broadcasting digitial in the subcarrier.
> Why would the university sell off our our FM license and then buy us an AM one (not that there are any available ones to buy)?
Because an FM license is worth more money than an AM license, and by liquidating the FM license and FM equipment in favor of AM and AM digital equipment you could probably actually afford to go to a digital broadcast.
> I doubt that the AM digital equipment is any cheaper than FM digital equipment.
No, but AM broadcasting equipment sure is. 5000W of AM goes a heck of a lot farther than 10,000W of FM. Just the cost difference in selling this would replace all your IF hardware with new digital magic. Plus, you'd actually increase your broadcast range.
Look, I'm not a fan of commercial radio. I think it sucks. I have been in the radio business. I have written checkes to ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. I wanted to license a LPFM 10W station for fun until Clear Channel, Cumulus, and AMFM (Before Clear Chanel sucked em up) ruined all that goodness. I don't think it's right to let money control who gets to broadcast, but you seem to think that it should also control how it is broadcast. That is bullshit. Allowing and promoting digital broadcasts can only help small stations. Here's why:
By the time digital broadcasting are ubiquitous IF-stage digital equipment will be affordable, standardized, and probably available at much lower cost or even used. Until that time, analog broadcasts will still be able to be received by everyone's new digital radios. Just because FM analog will start sounding like shit compared to FM digital doesn't mean it won't work and you can't broadcast with it. Our cars still have AM radios don't they and they shound like ass!
Digital on subcarrier broadcasting technologies also not only make the music sound better, but they increase the broadcast range tremendously due to decreased SNR requirements. Now your 10,000W FM station gets crystal clear reception another 35 miles away! 10W FM stations can have a coverage radius of 3-5 miles with digital broadcasts. Think of how much farther your 1000W AM station can go with digital - it's pretty wild! This is probably the most overlooked aspect of digital broadcasting, especially by low power stations.
Finally, once digital broadcasting IS indeed ubiquitous, we can start doing fun stuff like cramming low power digital-only stations right next to other stations on the dial.. You can't very well do that at all with analog broadcast. More air means more opportunity. Clear Channel is going to run maybe 6 or 8 stations maximum in a market, If there are 200 "spots on the FM dial" for stations as opposed to what we've got now, someone's going to be able to fill them up.
> Well, the above mentioned reasons aside (equipment costs, etc.), why should quality radio that directly serves the interest of the market it broadcasts into (serving the public vs. the corporate interests that pay to be the "hit o' the week") move aside?
It seems to me that you are way too locked into old ways of thinking about radio. Assuming digital radio takes off bigtime, the notion of frequency and band will likely become as meaningless as they are in the television industry today. I mean, you probably don't go apeshit when the cable company bumps your favorite channel from Superband to Ultraband even though there's less bandwidth for it there - the picture is still passable. Why should radio be any different if you can make a high-quality digital broadcast on AM, FM, Shortwave, Weather bands, whatever. Why fight for some specific frequency if you can produce a quality show that people will listen to?
> Does it sound like my answers are emotionally charged? Of course they are. Sure, there are probably dozens of technological and economic reasons to shove aside community radio, let the Clear Channel's of the world have their way and be forced to listen to Top 5 crap. Does that mean it's a good idea for the people of the community? No.
Never did I mention shoving it aside. I just mentioned that digital am with a lower startup cost, more available licensing, and the afforded range of AM would be an ideal place for community, college, and independent radio stations.
> As a parallel, I'm sure there are plenty of technological and economic reasons to force DRM into every hardware & software option out there. Clearly, it allows better quality music, right? It protects the musicians' (and they're backers) rights, etc., etc. That doesn't mean it's what's best for us.
DRM is a totally different issue. It's an access control technology. Digital broadcasting has little parallel to DRM. More of a parallel would be to liken it to the days before FM radio or before CD players or before video cassettes. I mean, thinking that way is like saying that the CD player was forced onto the market by the record companies to crush smaller producers who could not afford to produce the expensive discs. (And they really used to be insanely expensive to manufacture) -- Companies still produce tapes today even though they are now more expenve than CD's.
Radio will live on. Mabye someday it will be free and good and all that other great stuff, but until then, don't knock the digital. You know you want it. I mean if iBiquity or whatever they are called dropped the transmitting equipment off at your station for free including a free reciever for your car to hear it, would you really not hook it up?
Um. Nobody said you had to do a digital broadcast. Besides, even if you did get your license auctioned out from under you, you could probably persuade UVA to pick you up some digital AM equipment and an AM license. Digital broadcast on AM is easily better sounding than the current best analog FM technologies.
Maybe digital AM is where community radio ought to be?
I would also like to know how you generate that graph or at least collect the data points. That graph gave me a great idea to do FFT's and generate a spectrogram of the data.
I wonder if you'd see a face in there just like in spectrograms of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker!?
WTF are you talking about VC++ produces win32/x86 code? Hey look, I hate all things M$ just as much as the next guy, but Visual Studio can pretty much be made to compile for anything using just about any different backend you want with a little configuration. You can even backend gcc with it and cross compile for Linux/PPC with it if you wanted to (doubtful anyone has even attempted to do something so ridiculous.) And, even though I don't own or use it, it's a pretty featureful IDE from what I've seen.
No. Collectors seem to value metallic meteorites a lot more than non metallic meteorites. There are a lot of folks that make jewelry or knife blades and whatnot out of them.
By verifying it's authenticity, I mean that you have reasonable proof that it fell from the sky after travelling through space -- that it is, indeed a meteorite and not just some misshapen hunk of obsidian from some local volcano.
While it's true that MS was a huge proponent of ODBC and had a major hand in implementing it, ODBC is probably one of the only things that they probably helped do right and didnt get their grubby hands in to restrict and control. For more of the history of ODBC, why it's cool, and how it relates to things today, a good read is the chapter on ODBC in the O'Reily Perl DBI book. Much of the perl DBI is drawn and made possible by the existence of ODBC. Incedentally, ODBC MS has twice tried to supplant ODBC in its OS's with OLEDB and some newer ActiveX crap, but ODBC continues to hang on due to it's wide support and general standard implementation.
Sorry I don't have any more about ODBC for OS/X, but since it's unix-like, it's got a 95% chance of being UNIXODBC or iODBC. It's also undoubtadely documented on apple's developer site, which is probably why you can't find any documentation anywhere else.
There are 4 keys because they can be *rotated*... only one is active at any time. If the index is set at #3 on your AP and key number three is 1234ABCDEF, then a computer set to use the key 1234ABCDEF will work. Forget the key index. It has little to do with anything unless you actually rotate your keys.
Have it appraised and then sell it if you don't appreciate it enough to keep it. I'm guessing it's probably mostly metallic considering the mass that survived. It's worth a very pretty penny if you can verify its authenticity.
Besides, if they really even cared to monitor you, they wouldn't hit your website from their own addresses.
What a useless piece of garbage. If we're just wanting to get the conspiracy theorists all riled up, why dont we get the program sending hit information to a central repository where we can see how the fed's move around and spider us? That's much better information than just knowing when the last secretary in podunk's county clerk's office pulled up some inane flash game.
Relying on this (a local MTA) to send your mail is in general a terrible idea for dialup or consumer broadband accounts. First, many ISP's block or filter off-network port 25 traffic to prevent spammers from exploiting their service. Secondly, there are many many more ISP's who filter spam using dialup user lists - lists of IP addresses that are assigned to dialup or "home" broadband DSL/Cable/Wireless users. I personally know of over 50,000 mailboxes that would never recieve a message sent from an MTA on a dialup user list. I imagine that there are many more.
The proper way to run a remote MTA via your dialup or home broadband account is to set up (or have your isp configure) a permanently-connected upstream MTA that will allow you to use it as a smarthost via authenticated SMTP or SMTP/SSL. Tunneling this connection over ssh is a fairly sure-fire way to get around ISP's who block or redirect port 25 traffic to their own SMTP server. The only problem is that by the time you get that kind of a connection set up, you realize you could have solved your problem by tunneling your local port 25 to a "real" smtp server via ssh a lot easier than the headache you just went through setting up the godawful beast of sendmail.
There are similar features in all the OBC and OBC II BMW's.. Even my '85 735i has them. They all involve pressing some buttons at the same time and then getting some info of some sort. I use the feature that tells me the actual amount of gas in the tank all the time. It's a lot more useful than the 'range' feature. In the E23 it's not super accurate but the E36 gets it down to 1/10's of a liter.
First things first: People who shortcut words like 'to' into '2' are about five operative brain cells away from going flatline. Letting the fallacy slip into their schoolwork is absolutely ridiculous.
If you use some sort of instant messaging, the next time someone starts feeding 'u' a bunch of gibberish, tell them to stop it when they type IM's or email to you. If they don't stop, stop communicating with them online.
What people are really doing here is trying to save time when typing. Some people cannot type quickly despite extensive practice. Before our written language dissolves into a bunch of phonemes all expressed by single written characters (Hiragana anyone?), what we ought to do is promote the use of typing shortcut programs that automatically expand shortcut typings into complete words. This idea is by no means new, and typing shortcut applications predate 16-bit processors.
In the next version of AIM, AOL should include such a typing expander and the default install should have it turned ON. The problem would be solved -- most o/t ppl would b 2 stupid 2 know how 2 turn it off -- as evidenced by their illiteracy.
The scheme he's using is something akin to talking to an "ide switchbox" via the single IDE controller. He's got 7 bits of address space for drives, so -- you could have 128 drives. If you were to use the upcoming Maxtor 320GB drives, that'd be almost 41TB (4.096e13 bytes) or 37.25TiB
For those who say they'd give up their TV's.... you probably don't have a TiVo, do you?
I would probably pick broadband over TV, but consider this: If someone asked me to choose between the TiVo on a 2" black and white TV or the 42" color TV without a TiVo, I'd choose the 2" black and white TV. Yep, it makes *that* much of a difference.
Alvarion (formerly BreezeCom) equipment: in particular their BreezeNet/BreezeAccess bridge units mentioned in the article are not proprietary devices. They are 802.11 FHSS devices, and as such they do not operate with 802.11b DSSS devices. Granted, they have extra non-standards-compliant features on them such as RADIUS authentication, but these will simply be disabled if they are talking to a non-alvarion AP.
Frequency Hopping is still a very good way to go onto unlicensed 2.4GHz bands for the last mile from carrier-grade ISP's and the business WAN's that do not want to worry as much about interference from consumer-grade DSSS equipment.
Honestly, have none of you out there actually tried (ie failed) to DEPLOY any 802.11b for WAN in a densley packed downtown area? I mean, you can't even do it. 3 non-overlapping channels makes it hard enough to deploy it for seamless roaming in a two story building! You can get about 26 concurrent cells in FHSS without significant problems.
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All he needs to do is ensure that upon a sideways fall, it will roll to where a wheel has grip. Then, running the wheel at full power can flip it onto its back (or front) where it can right itself again using quick reflexes and a little angular momentum.
The easy idea would be to place some sort of hemisphere on the outside rims of the wheels so that an unattached wheel would roll to its side. You'd also have to place some extension to the left and right at the top to prevent the unit from lying flat. As long as only one edge of the tire gripped the ground, rotating the tire at high speed in one direction or another should (messily) jerk/flip the unit in a position from which it can recover. (It should be less force than a fall at any rate)
The final piece of the puzzle would be to add some type of sensor that allows you to discern your angular orientation with respect to the ground. One or more accelerometers would be sufficient for this.
~GoRK
This is never going to amount to a mass of anything (save vapor) if it's not applied as a standard and supported in hardware. G.721, G.729, GSM, and aLaw and uLaw are pretty established codec's that in supporting, you can communicate with probalby 99% of VoIP equipment out there....
It's very sad that speex will never make it as a viable codec for VoIP. Perhaps it would be beneficial for an orginasation such as the FSF to support these open sourc codec's efforts to lobby and apply for standards support so that future products might actually use them one day -- epseically in an application such as VoIP where interoperability is often the number one concern in establishing large scale acceptance.
~GoRK
What is this?!
You are in college, and you can't spell 'privilege' correctly? Did you pay your way there? What can we do about it!?!?
Good grief. You're lucky they're not making you take a spelling test, too. Good luck testing out of your basic computing skills class!
~GoRK
>> Nobody said you had to do a digital broadcast.
> That's the whole point, my friend, this will be the only way to broadcast. Either you buy the equipment from iBiquity, pay for the maintenance contracts, etc., or you don't broadcast.
I happen to think that BMW is "the only way to drive" but that doesn't mean there isn't room for other cars on the road. The receiving radios still get analog FM. That's the whole point of broadcasting digitial in the subcarrier.
> Why would the university sell off our our FM license and then buy us an AM one (not that there are any available ones to buy)?
Because an FM license is worth more money than an AM license, and by liquidating the FM license and FM equipment in favor of AM and AM digital equipment you could probably actually afford to go to a digital broadcast.
> I doubt that the AM digital equipment is any cheaper than FM digital equipment.
No, but AM broadcasting equipment sure is. 5000W of AM goes a heck of a lot farther than 10,000W of FM. Just the cost difference in selling this would replace all your IF hardware with new digital magic. Plus, you'd actually increase your broadcast range.
Look, I'm not a fan of commercial radio. I think it sucks. I have been in the radio business. I have written checkes to ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. I wanted to license a LPFM 10W station for fun until Clear Channel, Cumulus, and AMFM (Before Clear Chanel sucked em up) ruined all that goodness. I don't think it's right to let money control who gets to broadcast, but you seem to think that it should also control how it is broadcast. That is bullshit. Allowing and promoting digital broadcasts can only help small stations. Here's why:
By the time digital broadcasting are ubiquitous IF-stage digital equipment will be affordable, standardized, and probably available at much lower cost or even used. Until that time, analog broadcasts will still be able to be received by everyone's new digital radios. Just because FM analog will start sounding like shit compared to FM digital doesn't mean it won't work and you can't broadcast with it. Our cars still have AM radios don't they and they shound like ass!
Digital on subcarrier broadcasting technologies also not only make the music sound better, but they increase the broadcast range tremendously due to decreased SNR requirements. Now your 10,000W FM station gets crystal clear reception another 35 miles away! 10W FM stations can have a coverage radius of 3-5 miles with digital broadcasts. Think of how much farther your 1000W AM station can go with digital - it's pretty wild! This is probably the most overlooked aspect of digital broadcasting, especially by low power stations.
Finally, once digital broadcasting IS indeed ubiquitous, we can start doing fun stuff like cramming low power digital-only stations right next to other stations on the dial.. You can't very well do that at all with analog broadcast. More air means more opportunity. Clear Channel is going to run maybe 6 or 8 stations maximum in a market, If there are 200 "spots on the FM dial" for stations as opposed to what we've got now, someone's going to be able to fill them up.
> Well, the above mentioned reasons aside (equipment costs, etc.), why should quality radio that directly serves the interest of the market it broadcasts into (serving the public vs. the corporate interests that pay to be the "hit o' the week") move aside?
It seems to me that you are way too locked into old ways of thinking about radio. Assuming digital radio takes off bigtime, the notion of frequency and band will likely become as meaningless as they are in the television industry today. I mean, you probably don't go apeshit when the cable company bumps your favorite channel from Superband to Ultraband even though there's less bandwidth for it there - the picture is still passable. Why should radio be any different if you can make a high-quality digital broadcast on AM, FM, Shortwave, Weather bands, whatever. Why fight for some specific frequency if you can produce a quality show that people will listen to?
> Does it sound like my answers are emotionally charged? Of course they are. Sure, there are probably dozens of technological and economic reasons to shove aside community radio, let the Clear Channel's of the world have their way and be forced to listen to Top 5 crap. Does that mean it's a good idea for the people of the community? No.
Never did I mention shoving it aside. I just mentioned that digital am with a lower startup cost, more available licensing, and the afforded range of AM would be an ideal place for community, college, and independent radio stations.
> As a parallel, I'm sure there are plenty of technological and economic reasons to force DRM into every hardware & software option out there. Clearly, it allows better quality music, right? It protects the musicians' (and they're backers) rights, etc., etc. That doesn't mean it's what's best for us.
DRM is a totally different issue. It's an access control technology. Digital broadcasting has little parallel to DRM. More of a parallel would be to liken it to the days before FM radio or before CD players or before video cassettes. I mean, thinking that way is like saying that the CD player was forced onto the market by the record companies to crush smaller producers who could not afford to produce the expensive discs. (And they really used to be insanely expensive to manufacture) -- Companies still produce tapes today even though they are now more expenve than CD's.
Radio will live on. Mabye someday it will be free and good and all that other great stuff, but until then, don't knock the digital. You know you want it. I mean if iBiquity or whatever they are called dropped the transmitting equipment off at your station for free including a free reciever for your car to hear it, would you really not hook it up?
~GoRK
~GoRK
Um. Nobody said you had to do a digital broadcast. Besides, even if you did get your license auctioned out from under you, you could probably persuade UVA to pick you up some digital AM equipment and an AM license. Digital broadcast on AM is easily better sounding than the current best analog FM technologies.
Maybe digital AM is where community radio ought to be?
I would also like to know how you generate that graph or at least collect the data points. That graph gave me a great idea to do FFT's and generate a spectrogram of the data.
I wonder if you'd see a face in there just like in spectrograms of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker!?
~GoRK
WTF are you talking about VC++ produces win32/x86 code? Hey look, I hate all things M$ just as much as the next guy, but Visual Studio can pretty much be made to compile for anything using just about any different backend you want with a little configuration. You can even backend gcc with it and cross compile for Linux/PPC with it if you wanted to (doubtful anyone has even attempted to do something so ridiculous.) And, even though I don't own or use it, it's a pretty featureful IDE from what I've seen.
No. Collectors seem to value metallic meteorites a lot more than non metallic meteorites. There are a lot of folks that make jewelry or knife blades and whatnot out of them.
By verifying it's authenticity, I mean that you have reasonable proof that it fell from the sky after travelling through space -- that it is, indeed a meteorite and not just some misshapen hunk of obsidian from some local volcano.
While it's true that MS was a huge proponent of ODBC and had a major hand in implementing it, ODBC is probably one of the only things that they probably helped do right and didnt get their grubby hands in to restrict and control. For more of the history of ODBC, why it's cool, and how it relates to things today, a good read is the chapter on ODBC in the O'Reily Perl DBI book. Much of the perl DBI is drawn and made possible by the existence of ODBC. Incedentally, ODBC MS has twice tried to supplant ODBC in its OS's with OLEDB and some newer ActiveX crap, but ODBC continues to hang on due to it's wide support and general standard implementation.
Sorry I don't have any more about ODBC for OS/X, but since it's unix-like, it's got a 95% chance of being UNIXODBC or iODBC. It's also undoubtadely documented on apple's developer site, which is probably why you can't find any documentation anywhere else.
There are 4 keys because they can be *rotated* ... only one is active at any time. If the index is set at #3 on your AP and key number three is 1234ABCDEF, then a computer set to use the key 1234ABCDEF will work. Forget the key index. It has little to do with anything unless you actually rotate your keys.
Have it appraised and then sell it if you don't appreciate it enough to keep it. I'm guessing it's probably mostly metallic considering the mass that survived. It's worth a very pretty penny if you can verify its authenticity.
Who watches the watchers?
Besides, if they really even cared to monitor you, they wouldn't hit your website from their own addresses.
What a useless piece of garbage. If we're just wanting to get the conspiracy theorists all riled up, why dont we get the program sending hit information to a central repository where we can see how the fed's move around and spider us? That's much better information than just knowing when the last secretary in podunk's county clerk's office pulled up some inane flash game.
Relying on this (a local MTA) to send your mail is in general a terrible idea for dialup or consumer broadband accounts. First, many ISP's block or filter off-network port 25 traffic to prevent spammers from exploiting their service. Secondly, there are many many more ISP's who filter spam using dialup user lists - lists of IP addresses that are assigned to dialup or "home" broadband DSL/Cable/Wireless users. I personally know of over 50,000 mailboxes that would never recieve a message sent from an MTA on a dialup user list. I imagine that there are many more.
The proper way to run a remote MTA via your dialup or home broadband account is to set up (or have your isp configure) a permanently-connected upstream MTA that will allow you to use it as a smarthost via authenticated SMTP or SMTP/SSL. Tunneling this connection over ssh is a fairly sure-fire way to get around ISP's who block or redirect port 25 traffic to their own SMTP server. The only problem is that by the time you get that kind of a connection set up, you realize you could have solved your problem by tunneling your local port 25 to a "real" smtp server via ssh a lot easier than the headache you just went through setting up the godawful beast of sendmail.
What about adapting a 2.5" ide drive to 3.5" sca scsi?
Seriously.
I am replying to myself because I'm so pissed off.
I can't even post an intelligent argument because I'm so pissed off.
Lik Sang is a good company and they are always nice to do business with.
Microshaft is not.
Fuck those guys. I'm going home.
I'm sorry, but fuck Michrosoft's whiny bitch ass with a big rubber mickey mouse dick. This is just out of line.
If you read my past comments you'll see I don't usually flame, but this is ridiculous.
Mod me up, scotty.
I mean, Jesus...
I think it would be pretty smooth if they also offered this IDE-SCSI converter in an SCA version. I'd pick up three just to try them out!
There are similar features in all the OBC and OBC II BMW's.. Even my '85 735i has them. They all involve pressing some buttons at the same time and then getting some info of some sort. I use the feature that tells me the actual amount of gas in the tank all the time. It's a lot more useful than the 'range' feature. In the E23 it's not super accurate but the E36 gets it down to 1/10's of a liter.
First things first: People who shortcut words like 'to' into '2' are about five operative brain cells away from going flatline. Letting the fallacy slip into their schoolwork is absolutely ridiculous.
If you use some sort of instant messaging, the next time someone starts feeding 'u' a bunch of gibberish, tell them to stop it when they type IM's or email to you. If they don't stop, stop communicating with them online.
What people are really doing here is trying to save time when typing. Some people cannot type quickly despite extensive practice. Before our written language dissolves into a bunch of phonemes all expressed by single written characters (Hiragana anyone?), what we ought to do is promote the use of typing shortcut programs that automatically expand shortcut typings into complete words. This idea is by no means new, and typing shortcut applications predate 16-bit processors.
In the next version of AIM, AOL should include such a typing expander and the default install should have it turned ON. The problem would be solved -- most o/t ppl would b 2 stupid 2 know how 2 turn it off -- as evidenced by their illiteracy.
The scheme he's using is something akin to talking to an "ide switchbox" via the single IDE controller. He's got 7 bits of address space for drives, so -- you could have 128 drives. If you were to use the upcoming Maxtor 320GB drives, that'd be almost 41TB (4.096e13 bytes) or 37.25TiB
... the C# programming language.
For those who say they'd give up their TV's.... you probably don't have a TiVo, do you?
I would probably pick broadband over TV, but consider this: If someone asked me to choose between the TiVo on a 2" black and white TV or the 42" color TV without a TiVo, I'd choose the 2" black and white TV. Yep, it makes *that* much of a difference.
~GoRK
No. Honeypots have nothing to do with Free-access 802.11b service.
The term most wireless ISP's use is "hot spot", so I can see where the confusion probably stems from.
Alvarion (formerly BreezeCom) equipment: in particular their BreezeNet/BreezeAccess bridge units mentioned in the article are not proprietary devices. They are 802.11 FHSS devices, and as such they do not operate with 802.11b DSSS devices. Granted, they have extra non-standards-compliant features on them such as RADIUS authentication, but these will simply be disabled if they are talking to a non-alvarion AP.
Frequency Hopping is still a very good way to go onto unlicensed 2.4GHz bands for the last mile from carrier-grade ISP's and the business WAN's that do not want to worry as much about interference from consumer-grade DSSS equipment.
Honestly, have none of you out there actually tried (ie failed) to DEPLOY any 802.11b for WAN in a densley packed downtown area? I mean, you can't even do it. 3 non-overlapping channels makes it hard enough to deploy it for seamless roaming in a two story building! You can get about 26 concurrent cells in FHSS without significant problems.
God, yes I know they were! I was just hoping that you weren't one of those people who buy stuff just to ransom it on ebay.
I lost my iopener to one of those people and my attempt to get a second BBA was probalby thwarted by such people.