16-bit, 100-megasample+ ADCs are already on the market, actually. The current USRP design is a couple of years old; I'd expect them to upgrade their ADCs pretty soon if they haven't already.
And Pioneer? Voyager? Dude: I carry more technology than that in my fucking wristwatch. I should -hope- that amateur radio has advanced similarly...but that doesn't make it fun, or exciting. It just makes it more advanced than it used to be. (Duh.) Ham radio was, I thought, supposed to be about communicating in ways which otherwise weren't possible with people who otherwise were unreachable. It used to be high-tech. It used to be cutting-edge. That time is past.
Definitely some valid points; I won't defend the hobby against most of the criticisms you posted. We were originally charged with the advancement of the radio art. Now that radio is a solved problem, there's only the public-service mission, and the related one of maintaining a reserve corps of skilled operators, to fall back on. Instead, like you're saying, the average ham acts like the local repeater is his own personal cell site. That's not a sustainable situation when the VHF/UHF spectrum he's using is so valuable to commercial and government interests.
Still: do you really want to delegate the maintenance of all of your monitoring and communications options to third-party interests? The day may come when the FCC strikes Part 97 from its rulebook and orders all Amateur equipment turned in at the nearest Verizon reseller.... and my skills and experience, along with whatever gear I can squirrel away, will only become more valuable to me if that happens.
My experience, and I've had a technician's license for about 15 years, is that nowdays most amateur radio operators just want to talk. There's very little interest in electronics, building your own rigs and antennas and any sort of technical stuff.
Not necessarily true. There's a lot of interest, but it's widely-dispersed. You may not hear people talking about designing a homemade spectrum analyzer on your local 2M repeater, but that doesn't mean they're not out there.
And somebody must be building all those K2s you hear on HF, right?
Look past the repeaters and the contests. That's not where the fun stuff is happening.
As a lot of people have mentioned (some more politely than others), ham radio's appeal as a general-purpose communications service is pretty limited these days due to the sheer number of alternatives. It's still unbeatable in emergencies, but if emergency support isn't your thing, you may be left wondering what the point is.
That's a shame, because there is still some really-interesting stuff happening on the fringes. For the technically inclined, eBay has made it possible to obtain equipment and components for Amateur "homebrewing" that major military/commercial labs were damned lucky to have in the 70s and 80s. It is hard to overemphasize how cool that is. Even most hams don't realize that they can own better RF equipment and components than NASA had when they launched Voyager and Pioneer.
Ham radio gives you a great framework for engagement with every technology from software-defined radio to microwave communications to precision timekeeping. Build that DC-to-daylight receiver you've always wanted... the one the Feds won't let you buy off the shelf. Run your own "Amateur Deep Space Network" receiver site, or communicate with other people all over the world by bouncing your signal off the Moon. There is still more cool stuff to learn and do in Amateur Radio than you will ever have time to tackle... if you don't fall into the trap of thinking it's all a bunch of old farts carrying walkie-talkies around for no good reason. Like lawyers, 98% of hams give the rest a bad name.
There are a few links on my site (in the comment header) to various homebrew/experimental projects, but most of them are broken at the moment due to a hosting move that's taking way longer than it was supposed to. Anyone interested in the technical side of things is welcome to email me for advice and indoctrination.:-P
In short: some parts of ham radio have benefitted tremendously from the advent of the Internet; but yeah, it's also true that many of the other aspects are less relevant than ever. You get out of the hobby what you're willing to put into it.
Somebody on K5 posted a link to a page describing a condition that absolutely is freakin'-A real, and a whole lot scarier than some unwanted bits of carpet fuzz that nobody but the patient can see. Google for "Guinea Worm"... but if I were you, I'd wait until daylight to do it.
They could be pulling off the next War of the Worlds with this, if they get enough people to "share the delusion." It works on so many different levels...
Yet, despite the fact that there are TONS more ants on the earth than humans, and the number of generations of ants in all of history, they never evolved to have art or culture.
Your professor is an idiot. Ask any 16-year-old kid with a guitar why he learned to play it.
At which point I stop you, and ask why you don't have sufficient capacity on your circuit, such that it's triggering a UPS...
It's a pretty wimpy circuit, all right. You could also argue that the UPS is a bit too sensitive to transients. But there's no excuse for the switch to be that intolerant of minor power glitches, especially when it's so cheap to do the job right. They had a robust design, but that extra 1000 microfarads must have looked bad on a quarterly balance sheet or something.
Real world sounds poorly planned, to me.
Yep. That's why they call it "reality" -- every chain has a weak link. In this case, and in plenty of other cases I'm aware of, the weak link was made by D-Link.
Agreed. D-Link appears to occupy a point on the cost-quality curve that ultimately costs more in hair-pulling time than it saves in cash. Their products may be OK for lightweight use at home, but they can really give you fits in a more demanding environment.
Case in point: we recently put a bunch of DGS-1008D 8-port gigabit switches into service, and immediately started having problems with dropped Ethernet connections. Our laser printer was sucking down enough power at the onset of its fuser-warmup phase to trigger a nearby UPS momentarily. The resulting switchover transient lasted only a few milliseconds, but it was enough to reset the DGS-1008D. After a LOT of tail-chasing, it transpired that the (cheap-ass linear) wall-wart supplies that D-Link ships with the DGS-1008D lack sufficient filter capacitance to absorb even the slightest power glitch under high-load conditions (e.g., when there are several cables plugged into the switch.)
We took a few of their power supplies apart and found that the oldest ones -- which didn't have the problem -- used a 2000-uF filter capacitor at the rectifier output. At some point, they saved 10 cents by moving to a supply with only 1000 uF, rendering their product useless in many real-world office environments.
This isn't supposed to be a general "let's all bag on D-Link" thread, but hey, if the shoe fits...
In addition, channel 9 is also right about the frequency used by microwave ovens, according to Joshua Wright (whose name you'll see on plenty of wireless security tools), and many inexpensive microwave ovens leak enough radiation to poison connections.
One data point in support of that: microwave.jpg. This is a long-term max-hold plot; most of the trace in channel 6 is my WiFi connection, about eight feet away from the analyzer's antenna. *All* of the crap near channel 11 is leakage from the microwave in the kitchen, two rooms away. Some of its energy is clearly bleeding all the way down to channel 6.
So yeah, anything above channel 6 is going to need to use short packets if you want it to coexist with this particular microwave oven. Much better for most people to stick with channel 1 or channel 6.
It's also worth noting that the microwave oven leaks at least 1,000 times more RF power than the WiFi hardware uses. This isn't unique to the oven I have at the moment; other microwaves I've owned exhibit about the same amount of leakage.
I think those are just some people confused about what the LOCK prefix is for (i.e., to force an instruction to execute atomically that otherwise would not be expected to). A lot of stuff would fail very spectacularly if simple 64-bit reads and writes weren't atomic.
In addition, and this is hellish, a 32-bit MOV is (generally) atomic on x86. You can rely on the high-order word and the low-order word staying together, without race conditions. The memory access semantics are different on x64 and many other platforms. This is not related to 64-bitness per se, you could see if you ported to multi-threaded 32-bit PPC as well, but it will still surface if you do the transition to AMD64/EM64T/x64. Or rather, it will result in an additional one-in-a-million crash in your source, that you'll blame on bad memory chips in the user's machine.
Cite? I've never heard of this, and find it pretty hard to believe, to say the least.
You essentially stated a truism: if you don't die of anything else, you'll die of cancer. The problem is that it is equally applicable to any other means of death, eg. if you don't die of anything else, you'll eventually die of being crushed under a 4-tonne flying pig.
It's nothing but conventional wisdom. I'm not a medical professional or flying-pig researcher, so hopefully nobody will treat my post as a primary source.
And I never said telomeres were the only thing that kept cells from becoming cancerous; merely pointing out that cells that do divide aren't going to do so forever without errors. When the error rate rises sufficiently, something nasty is going to happen... it's just a matter of time. Heart attacks, flying pigs, and so forth are nowhere near as inevitable as genetic glitches.
In Canada (I'm sure the USA is similar), the overall cancer rate is now 1 in 2... that's right 50% of the population will contract cancer at some point in their life (most of those will eventually die from it). Here's the real shocker. The Government response... (snip rant about carcinogens)
You're the victim of a very fundamental misunderstanding. The overall cancer death rate is actually 1 in 1. If you live long enough, you will eventually die of cancer. It's a perfectly-normal consequence of telomere loss due to aging.
As we get better at preventing and treating heart disease and other vascular problems like stroke, it's only reasonable to expect cancer death rates to rise. It is not reasonable to start leaping to wild-assed conclusions about carcinogens, cell phones, and conspiracies. None of those are the problem. The problem is that most of the low-hanging fruit in the health-care business has been picked, and only the hard problems like cancer (which, as others have noted, refers to a great variety of different diseases) remain.
That's actually a really good point. You could require a GMail account for registration -- effectively leveraging Google's spamfighting capabilities for your own purposes.
It's flawed logic to assume causation... but it is not flawed logic to ask just what problem these hearings are trying to solve. There doesn't seem to be one, if you actually look at the numbers.
Private companies cannot be relied upon to have the best interests of anything but their own pocketbook.
Exactly the grandparent's point. Whose "pocketbook" is served when a rocket blows up, losing expensive cargo and/or killing passengers? Safety is a market force.
The legislature has the right to pass laws, period. The legislature can and does have the right to pass contradictory, non-sensical, idiotic and even unconstitutional laws. That's well established and no number of postings even on Slashdot can change that.
What part of "Congress shall make no law" are you having trouble with?
The legislature has the right to pass laws, even bad laws; that's democracy
Correct; that's democracy. We don't live in a democracy, though. We live in a Constitutional republic. That means that the legislature most certainly does NOT have the right to pass laws of this nature.
Unfortunately, there are no consequences for legislators who make illegal laws. That's something we desperately need to fix at both the state and Federal levels.
I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on/. (other than the fact that most/.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function. Those changes in brain structure can lead to changes in behavior - that's the emerging consensus from scientists who research the brain.
The resistance comes from the implications of your proposition with respect to what it means to be a human being.
To the extent that books, movies, and computer games actually have a deleterious effect on adolescents' brain development, they are effectively the same as executable content. It's not much of a leap from there to conclude that people, or at least children, are nothing more than sophisticated programmable devices -- machines that have no free will to choose their own influences in life. It's an argument that rests on determinism, which bothers freethinking geeks the same way evolution frightens protestant Christians.
More specifically: if it turns out to be true that children can be "programmed" by media exposure alone, then everything Hilary Clinton has ever said about child-rearing being a collective responsibility suddently gains a lot of scientific weight. Any conservative who's tempted to jump onto this particular bandwagon had better think carefully about its direction and speed of travel. The bandwagon's next stop will be in the far-flung territories mapped by Huxley.
Lets compare charges for space exploration vs. defense as found in the constitution that grants powers to the federal government.
That argument is simply insane. You are talking about the same Federal Government that funded the Louisiana Purchase. The US government was spending large portions of its budget exploring and acquiring new territories before most of the current Armed Forces branches even existed.
Somebody needs to go through a bunch of these "B..b..but the Constitution says nothing about space exploration" posts with the -1,Troll stick. I don't know where this thinking is coming from, but it has no historical basis.
However, you're still gonna have to plunk down some money on proprietary software.
Not so much, now that both Xilinx and Altera FPGAs are available with very competitive free software licenses. Complete evaluation bundles for the Xilinx S3 are in the $100-$150 range...
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16-bit, 100-megasample+ ADCs are already on the market, actually. The current USRP design is a couple of years old; I'd expect them to upgrade their ADCs pretty soon if they haven't already.
And Pioneer? Voyager? Dude: I carry more technology than that in my fucking wristwatch. I should -hope- that amateur radio has advanced similarly...but that doesn't make it fun, or exciting. It just makes it more advanced than it used to be. (Duh.) Ham radio was, I thought, supposed to be about communicating in ways which otherwise weren't possible with people who otherwise were unreachable. It used to be high-tech. It used to be cutting-edge. That time is past.
Definitely some valid points; I won't defend the hobby against most of the criticisms you posted. We were originally charged with the advancement of the radio art. Now that radio is a solved problem, there's only the public-service mission, and the related one of maintaining a reserve corps of skilled operators, to fall back on. Instead, like you're saying, the average ham acts like the local repeater is his own personal cell site. That's not a sustainable situation when the VHF/UHF spectrum he's using is so valuable to commercial and government interests.
Still: do you really want to delegate the maintenance of all of your monitoring and communications options to third-party interests? The day may come when the FCC strikes Part 97 from its rulebook and orders all Amateur equipment turned in at the nearest Verizon reseller.... and my skills and experience, along with whatever gear I can squirrel away, will only become more valuable to me if that happens.
My experience, and I've had a technician's license for about 15 years, is that nowdays most amateur radio operators just want to talk. There's very little interest in electronics, building your own rigs and antennas and any sort of technical stuff.
Not necessarily true. There's a lot of interest, but it's widely-dispersed. You may not hear people talking about designing a homemade spectrum analyzer on your local 2M repeater, but that doesn't mean they're not out there.
And somebody must be building all those K2s you hear on HF, right?
Look past the repeaters and the contests. That's not where the fun stuff is happening.
As a lot of people have mentioned (some more politely than others), ham radio's appeal as a general-purpose communications service is pretty limited these days due to the sheer number of alternatives. It's still unbeatable in emergencies, but if emergency support isn't your thing, you may be left wondering what the point is.
:-P
That's a shame, because there is still some really-interesting stuff happening on the fringes. For the technically inclined, eBay has made it possible to obtain equipment and components for Amateur "homebrewing" that major military/commercial labs were damned lucky to have in the 70s and 80s. It is hard to overemphasize how cool that is. Even most hams don't realize that they can own better RF equipment and components than NASA had when they launched Voyager and Pioneer.
Ham radio gives you a great framework for engagement with every technology from software-defined radio to microwave communications to precision timekeeping. Build that DC-to-daylight receiver you've always wanted... the one the Feds won't let you buy off the shelf. Run your own "Amateur Deep Space Network" receiver site, or communicate with other people all over the world by bouncing your signal off the Moon. There is still more cool stuff to learn and do in Amateur Radio than you will ever have time to tackle... if you don't fall into the trap of thinking it's all a bunch of old farts carrying walkie-talkies around for no good reason. Like lawyers, 98% of hams give the rest a bad name.
There are a few links on my site (in the comment header) to various homebrew/experimental projects, but most of them are broken at the moment due to a hosting move that's taking way longer than it was supposed to. Anyone interested in the technical side of things is welcome to email me for advice and indoctrination.
In short: some parts of ham radio have benefitted tremendously from the advent of the Internet; but yeah, it's also true that many of the other aspects are less relevant than ever. You get out of the hobby what you're willing to put into it.
Somebody on K5 posted a link to a page describing a condition that absolutely is freakin'-A real, and a whole lot scarier than some unwanted bits of carpet fuzz that nobody but the patient can see. Google for "Guinea Worm"... but if I were you, I'd wait until daylight to do it.
How'd they get a state university (admittedly, a bunch of Aggies) to buy into the scam, though? (http://www.healthsciences.okstate.edu/morgellons/ registration.cfm is linked from morgellons.org)
They could be pulling off the next War of the Worlds with this, if they get enough people to "share the delusion." It works on so many different levels...
Yet, despite the fact that there are TONS more ants on the earth than humans, and the number of generations of ants in all of history, they never evolved to have art or culture.
Your professor is an idiot. Ask any 16-year-old kid with a guitar why he learned to play it.
At which point I stop you, and ask why you don't have sufficient capacity on your circuit, such that it's triggering a UPS...
It's a pretty wimpy circuit, all right. You could also argue that the UPS is a bit too sensitive to transients. But there's no excuse for the switch to be that intolerant of minor power glitches, especially when it's so cheap to do the job right. They had a robust design, but that extra 1000 microfarads must have looked bad on a quarterly balance sheet or something.
Real world sounds poorly planned, to me.
Yep. That's why they call it "reality" -- every chain has a weak link. In this case, and in plenty of other cases I'm aware of, the weak link was made by D-Link.
Agreed. D-Link appears to occupy a point on the cost-quality curve that ultimately costs more in hair-pulling time than it saves in cash. Their products may be OK for lightweight use at home, but they can really give you fits in a more demanding environment.
Case in point: we recently put a bunch of DGS-1008D 8-port gigabit switches into service, and immediately started having problems with dropped Ethernet connections. Our laser printer was sucking down enough power at the onset of its fuser-warmup phase to trigger a nearby UPS momentarily. The resulting switchover transient lasted only a few milliseconds, but it was enough to reset the DGS-1008D. After a LOT of tail-chasing, it transpired that the (cheap-ass linear) wall-wart supplies that D-Link ships with the DGS-1008D lack sufficient filter capacitance to absorb even the slightest power glitch under high-load conditions (e.g., when there are several cables plugged into the switch.)
We took a few of their power supplies apart and found that the oldest ones -- which didn't have the problem -- used a 2000-uF filter capacitor at the rectifier output. At some point, they saved 10 cents by moving to a supply with only 1000 uF, rendering their product useless in many real-world office environments.
This isn't supposed to be a general "let's all bag on D-Link" thread, but hey, if the shoe fits...
In addition, channel 9 is also right about the frequency used by microwave ovens, according to Joshua Wright (whose name you'll see on plenty of wireless security tools), and many inexpensive microwave ovens leak enough radiation to poison connections.
One data point in support of that: microwave.jpg. This is a long-term max-hold plot; most of the trace in channel 6 is my WiFi connection, about eight feet away from the analyzer's antenna. *All* of the crap near channel 11 is leakage from the microwave in the kitchen, two rooms away. Some of its energy is clearly bleeding all the way down to channel 6.
So yeah, anything above channel 6 is going to need to use short packets if you want it to coexist with this particular microwave oven. Much better for most people to stick with channel 1 or channel 6.
It's also worth noting that the microwave oven leaks at least 1,000 times more RF power than the WiFi hardware uses. This isn't unique to the oven I have at the moment; other microwaves I've owned exhibit about the same amount of leakage.
I think those are just some people confused about what the LOCK prefix is for (i.e., to force an instruction to execute atomically that otherwise would not be expected to). A lot of stuff would fail very spectacularly if simple 64-bit reads and writes weren't atomic.
In addition, and this is hellish, a 32-bit MOV is (generally) atomic on x86. You can rely on the high-order word and the low-order word staying together, without race conditions. The memory access semantics are different on x64 and many other platforms. This is not related to 64-bitness per se, you could see if you ported to multi-threaded 32-bit PPC as well, but it will still surface if you do the transition to AMD64/EM64T/x64. Or rather, it will result in an additional one-in-a-million crash in your source, that you'll blame on bad memory chips in the user's machine.
Cite? I've never heard of this, and find it pretty hard to believe, to say the least.
You essentially stated a truism: if you don't die of anything else, you'll die of cancer. The problem is that it is equally applicable to any other means of death, eg. if you don't die of anything else, you'll eventually die of being crushed under a 4-tonne flying pig.
It's nothing but conventional wisdom. I'm not a medical professional or flying-pig researcher, so hopefully nobody will treat my post as a primary source.
And I never said telomeres were the only thing that kept cells from becoming cancerous; merely pointing out that cells that do divide aren't going to do so forever without errors. When the error rate rises sufficiently, something nasty is going to happen... it's just a matter of time. Heart attacks, flying pigs, and so forth are nowhere near as inevitable as genetic glitches.
In Canada (I'm sure the USA is similar), the overall cancer rate is now 1 in 2 ... that's right 50% of the population will contract cancer at some point in their life (most of those will eventually die from it). Here's the real shocker. The Government response... (snip rant about carcinogens)
You're the victim of a very fundamental misunderstanding. The overall cancer death rate is actually 1 in 1. If you live long enough, you will eventually die of cancer. It's a perfectly-normal consequence of telomere loss due to aging.
As we get better at preventing and treating heart disease and other vascular problems like stroke, it's only reasonable to expect cancer death rates to rise. It is not reasonable to start leaping to wild-assed conclusions about carcinogens, cell phones, and conspiracies. None of those are the problem. The problem is that most of the low-hanging fruit in the health-care business has been picked, and only the hard problems like cancer (which, as others have noted, refers to a great variety of different diseases) remain.
That's actually a really good point. You could require a GMail account for registration -- effectively leveraging Google's spamfighting capabilities for your own purposes.
Flawed logic indeed.
It's flawed logic to assume causation... but it is not flawed logic to ask just what problem these hearings are trying to solve. There doesn't seem to be one, if you actually look at the numbers.
Private companies cannot be relied upon to have the best interests of anything but their own pocketbook.
Exactly the grandparent's point. Whose "pocketbook" is served when a rocket blows up, losing expensive cargo and/or killing passengers? Safety is a market force.
The legislature has the right to pass laws, period. The legislature can and does have the right to pass contradictory, non-sensical, idiotic and even unconstitutional laws. That's well established and no number of postings even on Slashdot can change that.
What part of "Congress shall make no law" are you having trouble with?
The legislature has the right to pass laws, even bad laws; that's democracy
Correct; that's democracy. We don't live in a democracy, though. We live in a Constitutional republic. That means that the legislature most certainly does NOT have the right to pass laws of this nature.
Unfortunately, there are no consequences for legislators who make illegal laws. That's something we desperately need to fix at both the state and Federal levels.
I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on /. (other than the fact that most /.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function. Those changes in brain structure can lead to changes in behavior - that's the emerging consensus from scientists who research the brain.
The resistance comes from the implications of your proposition with respect to what it means to be a human being.
To the extent that books, movies, and computer games actually have a deleterious effect on adolescents' brain development, they are effectively the same as executable content. It's not much of a leap from there to conclude that people, or at least children, are nothing more than sophisticated programmable devices -- machines that have no free will to choose their own influences in life. It's an argument that rests on determinism, which bothers freethinking geeks the same way evolution frightens protestant Christians.
More specifically: if it turns out to be true that children can be "programmed" by media exposure alone, then everything Hilary Clinton has ever said about child-rearing being a collective responsibility suddently gains a lot of scientific weight. Any conservative who's tempted to jump onto this particular bandwagon had better think carefully about its direction and speed of travel. The bandwagon's next stop will be in the far-flung territories mapped by Huxley.
The same network that carries Command & Control data that is vital for operational information.
You guys keep lots of vital operational information on the O'Reilly Factor website, do you?
Lets compare charges for space exploration vs. defense as found in the constitution that grants powers to the federal government.
That argument is simply insane. You are talking about the same Federal Government that funded the Louisiana Purchase. The US government was spending large portions of its budget exploring and acquiring new territories before most of the current Armed Forces branches even existed.
Somebody needs to go through a bunch of these "B..b..but the Constitution says nothing about space exploration" posts with the -1,Troll stick. I don't know where this thinking is coming from, but it has no historical basis.
So what do we plan to do with these things again? I doubt anyone will notice if we dump it in the ocean again.
We could always atomize it and spew it into the atmosphere... which is exactly what we're already doing when we burn coal.
However, you're still gonna have to plunk down some money on proprietary software.
Not so much, now that both Xilinx and Altera FPGAs are available with very competitive free software licenses. Complete evaluation bundles for the Xilinx S3 are in the $100-$150 range...
I believe KEXP is financially independent of Allen, as of this year. They've been working towards that as a goal for several years now.
Either way, they are most certainly not publicly funded by taxes.