They've been doing this in Europe for a while, however they've been doing it at very low power, at carefully selected, very low frequencies that aren't going to cause major communciations problems.
They also use fairly decent encryption/authentication schemes.
Maybe because they've done research into the topic, and in-depth research at that? And discovered that while possible, there are serious side-effects that CAN be worked around, but probably aren't worth it. Especially if the wiring is 100% "clean".
Then all sorts of fun breaks out...
Not to mention the radiated energy problems... That's a BIG antenna.
But Digital Spread Sprectrum over PL is very, very finicky. The impedance changes with frequency, and changes with frequency with respect to everything that's using power. Start an old fridge and you're DL rate goes to nothing. A lightbulb about to burn out in your neighbor's house could throw enough hashing energy back into the system to cause dropped packets, or if your neighbor arc-welds.. Well, then, you're going to discover a LOT of interesting problems surfing while they're working.
It's not twisted pair. Not even close. Twisted pair is a walk in the park compared to the land of unshielded, unbalanced, bare steel wires strung from pole to pole to pole for 15 miles between you and wherever the CO is. And if they've decided solely to overcome the problem through power, then when you start to hear your packets through you're turned-off radio, you'll begin to understand the problems with this.
Obviously you know absolutely nothing of how large scale emergencies are handled, with respect to communication.
ARES, Amature Radio Emergency Services, steps up with the communications infrastructure is gone, due a disaster, natural or man-made.
Basically, a bunch of well-trained hams setup radio stations and manage the creation of an ad-hoc radio communications infrastructure when the main one goes down.
The World Trade Center had communcations by end of day, or end of the next day due to ARES going into motion and getting base-stations setup, probably all running on generators, so that those on-site trying to find survivors could communicate with each other and the outside world.
Now, with BPL, while you're trying to get this setup (becase the land-lines are gone, and the cell system is a laughingstock that's overran by people trying to call home), you've got the powerlines all radiating a ton of crap out in the airwaves. This is probably people trying to use their internet connection, even though the power's out, and they've got their generator running (those of us in certain more rural areas pretty much are required to own one to stay funcitonal).
All that background noise just makes it that much harder to communciate.
Actually, the fewer sets of cables running around, the MUCH easier it is to get things fixed when a problem happens.
Say someone runs into a telephone pole on the side of the road, knocking it over. Fire shows up because the downed wires have set the grass on fire. We watch it burn (I'm a volunteer on the local dept), waiting for PG&E to turn off that chunk of grid. Then we put out the fire. Then we wait for them to arrive, and help them remove the pole/wires from the road. Now, if we were REALLY unlucky, this pole was one end of a run that crossed the road, so now we have PacBell, PG&E, and Comcast that all need to come out and get THEIR cables out of the road, so that we can actually open it up to traffic.
At least with one provider, it's ONE person to scream at, instead of 3. Power and teleco aren't like to share lines, so that's out, but that's two instead of 3.
Actually, once out of the metro areas, water isn't all that often supplied. Most people in rural areas have their own wells, and often their own sewage system (septic tank + leach field).
But they still have power and phone. Just too bad that power and phone are so horribly managed in most areas (SBC/PacBell and PG&E, here...)
If you have to go through the expense of laying fiber, you might as well lay a lot of it. Fiber is cheap (by the foot), laying it is hella expensive. Running a witch-ditch crew to stich it in at a mile a day (or however slow those things crawl at) across the entire length of I-80 takes a LONG time, and lots of man-hours.
So, if you've got a high fixed cost that you can minimize by stitching the stuff into the ground once, then you're going to do (if you're a smart, long-term thinking company).
The problem now is getting the metro-areas able to take advantage of the fiber that's been laid.
In my area, prices have little to do with availability of long-haul lines, but the availability of hardware in the nearest CO, and whats on the poles between you and the CO. Who cares if the region has near-infinite b/w to the other side of the coast if the b/w to the CO, and from the CO to the regional wiring center is crap.
In an area like mine (Silicone Valley), the ability for tech workers to work from home would seriously decreas the amount of traffic on the roads, which would be a Very Good Thing (tm) for this area.
Unforunately, you can't do much about factory workers, except replace them with robots, but from my experience growing up in Michigan (Flint), they seem to be rather averse to that (although it's slowly happening more and more).
But the ability to work from home has lots of advantages, or at least working from satellite offices or small towns.
I don't have broadband at home in the Santa Cruz Mtns, but 5 minutes away is a coffee shop with wireless, and I can code from there for a cup of coffee an hour, and save me a 45 minute-each-way commute, and only use about a 1/10th the fuel for the day.
Eventualy, as more and more "white collar", or "tech" jobs move in this direction, I think we'll see a shift in traffic patterns and how people work.
Obviously you can't work from home every day, many people need shared access to things like hardware, and of the kind that can't be divied up, but I fore see an increasing percentage of people doing so in the relatively near future.
That's kinda a blanket statement to make. I installed Mandrake as my first linux OS, turned around and ripped it back out the next day, and went with RedHat, and then ripped THAT out, and then went with Debian before I found one that I liked.
I'm currently using Gentoo, as I prefer emerge to apt-get. Not saying it's better, just I like it better.
But different people at different skill-sets shouldn't all start with the same distro. I purposely recommended Gentoo for a friend as a second Linux distro to install because it would force him to actually learn about how Linux works.
If my mother wanted to install Linux, I'd probably suggest Mandrake, but people that are comfortable installing OSs can usually handle (and often prefer) a bit less hand-holding that the new GUI installs are giving.
Projector, the only way to go. Full screen? how about full wall.
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Put one on the IE menu, and lastly, redirect all entires in the URL bar to MSN search if it isn't a valid URL.
already done. Actually, if you have the address bar enabled in the explorer windows (as I do, since I like being able to switch directories by typing in a new path instead of clicking with the mouse for a while), you discover that there's also an option to "search from the address bar" that needs to be shut off.
Evil, evil, evil. I want 404s or 'not found' or 'invalid path', not MSN Search (or worse one of the 8 million XyzSearch websites that are out there squatting on misspelled domain names...)
If you're selling burglar tools in a plastic baggie with instructions on how to break into the most popular models of cars you might be a bit more responsible.
Slim-jim kits are readily available. Expected proper usage is tow-trucks, fire/ems, and police, but anyone can buy them.
If somone buys a kit, and then uses it to break into cars, I think you'd have a hard time prosecuting the manufacturer of the kit.
You need to know more MEs. Especially ones that work in the automotive field. But then, I went to a school that was like 65% mechanical engineering, with automotive specialty, in Michigan. So I met a LOT of ME's, and most did their own car work.
Lots got into it by starting off with restoring cars and loving to work on cars, or racing, etc.
Not if it's context switching continuously, working to make sure that all the deterministic stuff is getting it's slice of time.
Medical life-support equipment does very simple-minded things, and the people who write it's software can probably write very well-optimized code for the tasks that they need done, that need to be done immediately at time X.
"gui" performance is utterly irrelevant compared to making sure that everything that's scheduled to run, runs. Gui is fluff, the heart-monitor isn't.
The 'release now, patch later' doctrine is widely used in software...
And now due to Sorbanes-Oaxley (or however you spell/pronounce the damn thing), software companies that do this have to be very careful about deferred income reporting in the US. It's really, really ugly.
If you tell a customer that you're going to fix problem X in an upcoming patch, you have to defer the income from their buying the software until you release the patch, because they *might* have only bought the software when they did because they knew the patch was coming.
However, the REAL counterfitters, the ones that make lots of money at it, invest in it. They buy the same printing presses, the same paper, and they do it right.
If someone scans/prints (US) money, you should easily be able to tell the difference by feel of the paper alone, due to the cotton content of real money. Although that's work-aroundable.
Realtime doesn't mean fast. It means deterministic. It means that you can determine, that without a doubt, that A will happen within X amount of time after B.
The (few) deterministic systems that I've seen have all been slower than their non-deterministic counterparts. Things have to managed very differently.
Especially when playing with brushes. The metal-on-metal creates some, very, very, very high-frequency sounds.
And having listened to a good 96Khz 24bit/channel DAT system, and compared against about $30K in quality hardware starting with a Marantz SACD-1 playing a well-recorded Redbook audio signal, there's still no comparison for the detail of the high-frequency sounds.
If nothing else, it lets the high-frequency sound be a LOT less hard on the ears. Ears like sine-waves, not square-waves... Especially since a square-wave contains the fundamental frequency, and then every frequency above it in a logarithmic decary as the frequency goes up.
spread-specturm over power lines has been proven to be a bad idea.
It works, IFF the impedance across the frequency range that you're using stays the same, or you have the ability to react to the real-time changes in impedance at different frequencies due to motor start-ups, shut-downs, and who's got what on.
The cable wiring is terminated, and is a bus that's designed to carry data. It's the obivous choice.
Broadband over powerlines is only usefull for getting lots of attention from investors (who just seem to love it), but they have no clue just how hard it is to get any kind of reliable throughput through it.
I've personally seen amazing stuff in labs, and watched it work great in a friend's brand-new apartment, but as soon as it hit the the 30 year-old wiring in my apartment, it wasn't so happy. Add in ONE bad light fixture (halogen that was arching lightly between the bulb and the contact), and no communication at all. The RF noise from the arching killed it.
Then you have another problem with power-line distribution. And that's transformers. RF doesn't like going through transformers designed to step 60/50Hz AC power up/down from the high voltages.
Chemical processing involes method patents. There's definitely a lot of money and innovation, there.
Method patents really seem to fall apart in the computing/software world.
Perhaps "Method" should be rephrased to "Method of producing a physical product".
Software is nothing but methods..
But even then, the argument just falls apart. patents are messy, ugly things right now, and it's going a take a number of very smart people, considering ALL sides of the issues, to figure it out. Unfortunately, no-one with the resources really seems to care...
In smaller support groups, this tends to happen. Certain e-mail addresses are immediately kicked up with, "XYZ's got a problem, I'll just let you look at it."
Of course, I just normally walk through everything they need me to do, and then let them figure out really fast that I know more than they do, without me telling them so.
I used to do support, and every now and then would get customers that knew more than me (early on, at least) about the products. Those were times when i'd bump it to a more knowledgeable person REAL fast.
And for a fee, UPS stops at my dad's shop every day, to see if he's sending out any packages. FedEx hits up my company here twice a day, and DHL every day as well...
The movie analogy also breaks down in a different way. One of the reason's that you pay for each viewing is that you are paying to use the equipment at the theater.
One question that I do have is if theaters have to pay royalties per showing, or just pay X to get the reels in the first place?
What's after digital (meaning Redbook CD Audio)? DVD-Audio. Higher sampling rates and greater precision for each sample (96Khz and 24 or 48-bit, IIRC).
I've heard DAT tapes at those resolutions. There was a difference I could hear, although the $20K worth of audio equipment in between helped a bit, too.
You purchase the newer formats for the higher quality. Some CDs were initially released after cleaning up the original analog recording with filters, or were based of digital masters that had originally been released on tape. Hence you are paying for the "cleaned-up" version, as compared to just playing the tape into your aux-in, and writing the WAV file to CD.
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They've been doing this in Europe for a while, however they've been doing it at very low power, at carefully selected, very low frequencies that aren't going to cause major communciations problems.
They also use fairly decent encryption/authentication schemes.
It's the back-fed noise, which your breakers won't help with at all. If you're on the same transformer drop, you'll see their noise, too.
Maybe because they've done research into the topic, and in-depth research at that? And discovered that while possible, there are serious side-effects that CAN be worked around, but probably aren't worth it. Especially if the wiring is 100% "clean".
Then all sorts of fun breaks out...
Not to mention the radiated energy problems... That's a BIG antenna.
But Digital Spread Sprectrum over PL is very, very finicky. The impedance changes with frequency, and changes with frequency with respect to everything that's using power. Start an old fridge and you're DL rate goes to nothing. A lightbulb about to burn out in your neighbor's house could throw enough hashing energy back into the system to cause dropped packets, or if your neighbor arc-welds.. Well, then, you're going to discover a LOT of interesting problems surfing while they're working.
It's not twisted pair. Not even close. Twisted pair is a walk in the park compared to the land of unshielded, unbalanced, bare steel wires strung from pole to pole to pole for 15 miles between you and wherever the CO is. And if they've decided solely to overcome the problem through power, then when you start to hear your packets through you're turned-off radio, you'll begin to understand the problems with this.
Actually, FEMA uses ARES for it's emergency services in most areas....
Obviously you know absolutely nothing of how large scale emergencies are handled, with respect to communication.
ARES, Amature Radio Emergency Services, steps up with the communications infrastructure is gone, due a disaster, natural or man-made.
Basically, a bunch of well-trained hams setup radio stations and manage the creation of an ad-hoc radio communications infrastructure when the main one goes down.
The World Trade Center had communcations by end of day, or end of the next day due to ARES going into motion and getting base-stations setup, probably all running on generators, so that those on-site trying to find survivors could communicate with each other and the outside world.
Now, with BPL, while you're trying to get this setup (becase the land-lines are gone, and the cell system is a laughingstock that's overran by people trying to call home), you've got the powerlines all radiating a ton of crap out in the airwaves. This is probably people trying to use their internet connection, even though the power's out, and they've got their generator running (those of us in certain more rural areas pretty much are required to own one to stay funcitonal).
All that background noise just makes it that much harder to communciate.
Actually, the fewer sets of cables running around, the MUCH easier it is to get things fixed when a problem happens.
Say someone runs into a telephone pole on the side of the road, knocking it over. Fire shows up because the downed wires have set the grass on fire. We watch it burn (I'm a volunteer on the local dept), waiting for PG&E to turn off that chunk of grid. Then we put out the fire. Then we wait for them to arrive, and help them remove the pole/wires from the road. Now, if we were REALLY unlucky, this pole was one end of a run that crossed the road, so now we have PacBell, PG&E, and Comcast that all need to come out and get THEIR cables out of the road, so that we can actually open it up to traffic.
At least with one provider, it's ONE person to scream at, instead of 3. Power and teleco aren't like to share lines, so that's out, but that's two instead of 3.
Actually, once out of the metro areas, water isn't all that often supplied. Most people in rural areas have their own wells, and often their own sewage system (septic tank + leach field).
But they still have power and phone. Just too bad that power and phone are so horribly managed in most areas (SBC/PacBell and PG&E, here...)
If you have to go through the expense of laying fiber, you might as well lay a lot of it. Fiber is cheap (by the foot), laying it is hella expensive. Running a witch-ditch crew to stich it in at a mile a day (or however slow those things crawl at) across the entire length of I-80 takes a LONG time, and lots of man-hours.
So, if you've got a high fixed cost that you can minimize by stitching the stuff into the ground once, then you're going to do (if you're a smart, long-term thinking company).
The problem now is getting the metro-areas able to take advantage of the fiber that's been laid.
In my area, prices have little to do with availability of long-haul lines, but the availability of hardware in the nearest CO, and whats on the poles between you and the CO. Who cares if the region has near-infinite b/w to the other side of the coast if the b/w to the CO, and from the CO to the regional wiring center is crap.
In an area like mine (Silicone Valley), the ability for tech workers to work from home would seriously decreas the amount of traffic on the roads, which would be a Very Good Thing (tm) for this area.
Unforunately, you can't do much about factory workers, except replace them with robots, but from my experience growing up in Michigan (Flint), they seem to be rather averse to that (although it's slowly happening more and more).
But the ability to work from home has lots of advantages, or at least working from satellite offices or small towns.
I don't have broadband at home in the Santa Cruz Mtns, but 5 minutes away is a coffee shop with wireless, and I can code from there for a cup of coffee an hour, and save me a 45 minute-each-way commute, and only use about a 1/10th the fuel for the day.
Eventualy, as more and more "white collar", or "tech" jobs move in this direction, I think we'll see a shift in traffic patterns and how people work.
Obviously you can't work from home every day, many people need shared access to things like hardware, and of the kind that can't be divied up, but I fore see an increasing percentage of people doing so in the relatively near future.
That's kinda a blanket statement to make. I installed Mandrake as my first linux OS, turned around and ripped it back out the next day, and went with RedHat, and then ripped THAT out, and then went with Debian before I found one that I liked.
I'm currently using Gentoo, as I prefer emerge to apt-get. Not saying it's better, just I like it better.
But different people at different skill-sets shouldn't all start with the same distro. I purposely recommended Gentoo for a friend as a second Linux distro to install because it would force him to actually learn about how Linux works.
If my mother wanted to install Linux, I'd probably suggest Mandrake, but people that are comfortable installing OSs can usually handle (and often prefer) a bit less hand-holding that the new GUI installs are giving.
Projector, the only way to go. Full screen? how about full wall.
Put one on the IE menu, and lastly, redirect all entires in the URL bar to MSN search if it isn't a valid URL.
already done. Actually, if you have the address bar enabled in the explorer windows (as I do, since I like being able to switch directories by typing in a new path instead of clicking with the mouse for a while), you discover that there's also an option to "search from the address bar" that needs to be shut off.
Evil, evil, evil. I want 404s or 'not found' or 'invalid path', not MSN Search (or worse one of the 8 million XyzSearch websites that are out there squatting on misspelled domain names...)
If you're selling burglar tools in a plastic baggie with instructions on how to break into the most popular models of cars you might be a bit more responsible.
Slim-jim kits are readily available. Expected proper usage is tow-trucks, fire/ems, and police, but anyone can buy them.
If somone buys a kit, and then uses it to break into cars, I think you'd have a hard time prosecuting the manufacturer of the kit.
Been there, done that. At GMI, as well. Forgotten which textbook, now. But the bookstore wouldn't buy it back, as it wasn't being used next semester.
!#@!#!
You need to know more MEs. Especially ones that work in the automotive field. But then, I went to a school that was like 65% mechanical engineering, with automotive specialty, in Michigan. So I met a LOT of ME's, and most did their own car work.
Lots got into it by starting off with restoring cars and loving to work on cars, or racing, etc.
Not if it's context switching continuously, working to make sure that all the deterministic stuff is getting it's slice of time.
Medical life-support equipment does very simple-minded things, and the people who write it's software can probably write very well-optimized code for the tasks that they need done, that need to be done immediately at time X.
"gui" performance is utterly irrelevant compared to making sure that everything that's scheduled to run, runs. Gui is fluff, the heart-monitor isn't.
The 'release now, patch later' doctrine is widely used in software ...
And now due to Sorbanes-Oaxley (or however you spell/pronounce the damn thing), software companies that do this have to be very careful about deferred income reporting in the US. It's really, really ugly.
If you tell a customer that you're going to fix problem X in an upcoming patch, you have to defer the income from their buying the software until you release the patch, because they *might* have only bought the software when they did because they knew the patch was coming.
It's not new at all, as others have said.
However, the REAL counterfitters, the ones that make lots of money at it, invest in it. They buy the same printing presses, the same paper, and they do it right.
If someone scans/prints (US) money, you should easily be able to tell the difference by feel of the paper alone, due to the cotton content of real money. Although that's work-aroundable.
Realtime doesn't mean fast. It means deterministic. It means that you can determine, that without a doubt, that A will happen within X amount of time after B.
The (few) deterministic systems that I've seen have all been slower than their non-deterministic counterparts. Things have to managed very differently.
Cymbals (I probably miss-spelled that).
Especially when playing with brushes. The metal-on-metal creates some, very, very, very high-frequency sounds.
And having listened to a good 96Khz 24bit/channel DAT system, and compared against about $30K in quality hardware starting with a Marantz SACD-1 playing a well-recorded Redbook audio signal, there's still no comparison for the detail of the high-frequency sounds.
If nothing else, it lets the high-frequency sound be a LOT less hard on the ears. Ears like sine-waves, not square-waves... Especially since a square-wave contains the fundamental frequency, and then every frequency above it in a logarithmic decary as the frequency goes up.
spread-specturm over power lines has been proven to be a bad idea.
It works, IFF the impedance across the frequency range that you're using stays the same, or you have the ability to react to the real-time changes in impedance at different frequencies due to motor start-ups, shut-downs, and who's got what on.
The cable wiring is terminated, and is a bus that's designed to carry data. It's the obivous choice.
Broadband over powerlines is only usefull for getting lots of attention from investors (who just seem to love it), but they have no clue just how hard it is to get any kind of reliable throughput through it.
I've personally seen amazing stuff in labs, and watched it work great in a friend's brand-new apartment, but as soon as it hit the the 30 year-old wiring in my apartment, it wasn't so happy. Add in ONE bad light fixture (halogen that was arching lightly between the bulb and the contact), and no communication at all. The RF noise from the arching killed it.
Then you have another problem with power-line distribution. And that's transformers. RF doesn't like going through transformers designed to step 60/50Hz AC power up/down from the high voltages.
Chemical processing involes method patents. There's definitely a lot of money and innovation, there.
Method patents really seem to fall apart in the computing/software world.
Perhaps "Method" should be rephrased to "Method of producing a physical product".
Software is nothing but methods..
But even then, the argument just falls apart. patents are messy, ugly things right now, and it's going a take a number of very smart people, considering ALL sides of the issues, to figure it out. Unfortunately, no-one with the resources really seems to care...
In smaller support groups, this tends to happen. Certain e-mail addresses are immediately kicked up with, "XYZ's got a problem, I'll just let you look at it."
Of course, I just normally walk through everything they need me to do, and then let them figure out really fast that I know more than they do, without me telling them so.
I used to do support, and every now and then would get customers that knew more than me (early on, at least) about the products. Those were times when i'd bump it to a more knowledgeable person REAL fast.
And for a fee, UPS stops at my dad's shop every day, to see if he's sending out any packages. FedEx hits up my company here twice a day, and DHL every day as well...
The movie analogy also breaks down in a different way. One of the reason's that you pay for each viewing is that you are paying to use the equipment at the theater.
One question that I do have is if theaters have to pay royalties per showing, or just pay X to get the reels in the first place?
What's after digital (meaning Redbook CD Audio)? DVD-Audio. Higher sampling rates and greater precision for each sample (96Khz and 24 or 48-bit, IIRC).
I've heard DAT tapes at those resolutions. There was a difference I could hear, although the $20K worth of audio equipment in between helped a bit, too.
You purchase the newer formats for the higher quality. Some CDs were initially released after cleaning up the original analog recording with filters, or were based of digital masters that had originally been released on tape. Hence you are paying for the "cleaned-up" version, as compared to just playing the tape into your aux-in, and writing the WAV file to CD.