I've been waiting for something like this - Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, etc will be playing 24x7 in my area/w just an occasional break for station ID. No song titles, no nothing, just live shows rolling non stop:-)
Gibson is great, so is Stephenson, but if you like either one of them you should branch out and read Vernor Vinge.
Vinge wrote True Names way back when - *the* seminal work for hacker culture.
That work alone would make the man's efforts worthwhile, but Across Realtime, A Fire On The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky just completely blow that one out of the water.
If Gibson is working with his personal binoculars focused on the future, Vinge is doing the same thing using his own personal mental Hubble Telescope.
Stop clicking that mouse, get up, and get yourself to a bookstore RIGHT NOW!!!
SCO lost Autozone to IBM's Linux efforts. They're a huge auto parts distribution chain with about 6,000 stores the last time I looked - I used to work for a much smaller competitor of theirs that went bankrupt in the mid nineties.
Target has *within the last month* told SCO to go pound sand and done a deal with IBM for Linux conversion. I'm not sure how many locations they have - does anyone have that info handy? Please post if you do.
Sherwin Williams I know less about than either of the other two but IBM has helped SCO to the door there, too.
I hope Darl & company get prosecuted but I feel bad for the SCO troops - this is exactly the same behavior (pump & dump) I saw with the auto parts supplier where I worked in the mid nineties. I wrote a perl script that calculated severance for 4,000 employees and the scumbag behind the whole scheme went right into something much nicer than unemployment and vocational training:
I do an ls in my home directory and everything is fine. I do an 'ls -l' and I see stuff I deleted a long, long time ago. Other than this very disqueting discovery earlier today 5.2 has been sweet, solid, & flexible - sort of like dating an aerobics instructor. Maybe my troubles stem from a binary upgrade from 4.9 on this laptop, but somehow I don't think so...
I think I'll play with some of my newly functional USB devices and try to ignore the filesystem stuff...
Maybe those uptimes are load balancer => N=1 FreeBSD boxes.
FreeBSD still just rocks for overall uptime - I've gone four years without any trouble except on my much abused R&D boxes - the production stuff just keeps on producing...
Despite the numerous BSD is Dying trolls on here, it seems to be quite a lively corpse.
I have half a dozen 4.9 servers, a couple of 5.2 laptops, and I'm playing with the Motorola 88k RISC port of OpenBSD trying to get it to load on an MVME187...
One of these days I'll get all crazy and complete the family by putting NetBSD on my toaster oven...
I'm provocative but I rarely troll - take time to understand the difference.
Read through the responses to that article and what do you see?
BOO HOOO WHOA IS ME *WHINE* *SNIFFLE* 'FREE' MUSIC 'FREE' VIDEOS (a tiny hint of rational thought) *SOB* HUH? EVIL CORPORATE URCHINS! HOW DARE THEY CHARGE *ME* FOR WHAT I USE? BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Here and there you find a lucky few who have a consumer grade high speed internet pipe that they share with a large number of people who use it as expected; they have occasional burst but 98% of the time their link is standing idle.
The rest of the 'typical' slashdot responders have endless energy to whine about how they are being abused by evil corporate powers who work so hard to provide them service.
I've heard the false advertising argument and I suppose its technically correct but everyone who makes it RICHLY DESERVES to have the high speed provider in their area fold. A few *hours* on analog service and they'd have some other leftist/socialist rant about how it is their god given right to an inexpensive consumer type high speed service that they can use like an expensive wholesale circuit WITHOUT paying for that level of service.
More trolling? Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as pointing out a more insidious problem than companies charging for the services they provide - the effects of forty years of fuzzy headed liberal thinking in the US are clearly visible in the poorly worded rants by Gen-Y members about their entitlement to carrier grade internet service for a fraction of the cost of providing it.
This isn't the second time this has been covered, its about the tenth in the last two years.
I'm not going to repeat my explanation of IP bandwidth costs *AGAIN* - just go read my journal - it is one of the first posts.
The attitude on here just amazes me - I pay $85/mo for two public IPs, 256k of upstream that I can use like a wholesale pipe (ie 24x7 101% utilized) and I have 3 meg of downstream. If I were younger and more flexible I'd be turning backflips in celebration of this.
When you buy a T1 worth of IP in a the form of a T1 you spend $200+ just for the local loop and the bandwidth itself costs $800 from a quality carrier all the way down to $400 from a third tier. Lets break down my 'expensive' broadband connection.
Half the cost is inflow, half is outflow.
256k/1.544 = 1.6 - $1000 *.16 = $160/mo divide that by half - $80/mo cost for my outflow bandwidth
3meg/1.5meg = 2 - $1000 * 2 = $2,000/mo divide that by half - $1,000 mo cost for my inflow bandwidth.
Now, can anyone tell me how Cox Cable makes money selling me $1,160 worth of service for $85? Its simple - they have a whole lot of business class customers like me who use the network in a bursty fashion. The technical term here is aggregation.
The typical slashdot responder who coyly dodges specifying that he has a god given right to steal music and video owned (right or wrong) by someone else, and jumps into arguments about false advertising, facist ISPs, and the like.
I think given the horrible way all of you are being treated that the solution should be obvious - pool your funds, pick the most vocal opponent of these policies, and let him spend your hard earned money on building a 'proper' broadband ISP.... the silence is deafening...
Well dude, you're about to learn all about Fresnel zones.
You need to get a GPS reading from his house and from the location in the city where he wants to connect.
Line of site is a good start but 26 miles means you've got a first Fresnel zone radius of 77' at the midpoint and I used the cheater calculation that doesn't take earth curvature into account. If the Fresnel zone isn't clear you get signal loss - think of talking between two rooms with a door partially closed - the more closed the door, the louder you need to speak to be heard.
If the valley is long and flat does it have a river in the middle? Does it get fog? Hello, pathloss! That 22 mile shot I did runs colinear with the Missouri river and when we get airport closing fog that link loses half of its capacity.
Once you have the coordinates you need to examine the path - in the US we use DeLorme Topoquads for a quick and easy study of path geometry. I hear good things about Pathloss 4.0, but I can't afford toys like that.
Don't cost justify it based on Vonage VoIP service from back home. Telecom is a state monopoly in many countries and some of them having taken to legislating blocking of VoIP ports. If they aren't my experience is that south american ISPs generally try to maximize their queue depth:-( You'll be lucky if you're only 10:1 aggregated at the DSL provider.
Bandwidth cost what it costs... maybe you should stick to email?:-( This sounds like a very difficult project...
So SCO agrees to fight a proxy war against Open Source/Free Software and comes under the pay of Microsoft.
They're going to get what every country that engages in a proxy war gets - their asses kicked, ruined infrastructure, and very little thanks at the end of the day. A few corrupt generals are lining their pockets. It *is* exactly like some little banana republic, isn't it?
Now the natives in the homeland of the paymaster in this war have been subverted and they begin attacking the proxy in this war - excellent move - gives M$ *another* huge black eye on the security front and their puppet state of SCO is on the receiving end.
I don't understand the problem - sure, fiaSCO will try to spin this as something IBM orchestrated, but is anyone listening? They've offended everyone in computing except the natives that live on the beach where Intel collects sand to make their silicon and I'm sure they'll get sued next over some 'fine grained' multitasking copyright SCO fantasizes that they have.
SCO's web server is probably on fire right now. I think it is a moral duty of all slashdot readers to promptly mirror that site with wget so we can help 'em rebuild after the attack dies down. Lets enter the necessary wget command, count three simultaneously, and then press enter...
For every one who could write that there seem to be about two thousand who think 802.11 in their house directly scales to the same speeds for hundreds of users in a metro area.
It isn't wheat from chaff, Mr Electron Sir, its more like needle in a haystack - you, me, and a handful of others with radio.clue and legions of potential 11M operators on the other side of the aisle.
The 5800MHz radios we used were WiLan AWE-120 and they cost about $2k an end so its not something you're going to install just for fun. The AWE-120 is dead and the replacement is more expensive but its hardened for outdoor use and gets its power over ethernet - the installs are a lot cheaper this way.
I believe the antenna was an Andrew P2F - you can look at www.andrew.com for details. I recommened the Tesco catalog if you want info on antenna specs and such but you'll buy from eletro-comm.com. I've used a lot more RadioWaves antennas than Andrew - they're not as tight specs wise but they do a good job for a lot less.
If I can ask, where the heck are you going to do this? If you didn't already know this how did you find yourself in the position of designing a link like that?
I've got five moderator points this morning and there is exactly one post in here I'd mod up - the guy who suggested that people not post if they don't know anything, but he already has a +5.
There is a link in my sig to my journal and there you'll find a brief description of how 802.11 (wireless lan) and 802.16 (wireless access) differ.
50km == 30 miles. I've installed 2400MHz and 5800MHz links on the same 22 mile path and I've done a bunch of other 20 +/- 2 mile shots using 5800MHz.
At 22 miles with 19dB dishes on each end we saw analog modem speeds with 2400MHz (802.11b) equipment. Using 29dB 2' Andrew dishes and 100mw 5800MHz radios we saw a solid 5+ mbits on a radio that maxed out at 8 mbits.
I've planned a 40km 45 mbit shot for a project that didn't go through - I think we had a 4' dish on the remote tower and a 6' dish on the skyscraper end of the link.
Whatever band and modulation method they're using in these breathy 802.16 announcements the physics aren't going to be much different than what I describe above - long shots are point to point, cells are small (3km - 4km) if you want to go fast, and I mentally say "snake oil" when I hear the letters O-F-D-M. It works, but it ain't "all that", as they say.
So, mod me wise, or mod me troll, but know this: The slashdot collective has as much business talking about wireless networking as any room full of male gynecologists and cross dressers has talking about childbirth.
Linux is a kernel. GNU is an overall Unix replacement. GNU/HURD is a potential kernel replacement. BSD should be untainted by this and you've got three major and two minor varieties from which to choose, with FreeBSD being the easiest transition for Linux users.
The ecological niche here is *open* - even if Linux goes extinct over this, GNU+HURD or FreeBSD is going to slide right into that position, and if there is further trouble from the SCO camp I don't think *anyone* can impinge the likes of Plan9 or BeOS. Sure, it'll be a huge change, it might set us back another ten years, but Stallman opened Pandora's box a long time ago and no one is going to be able to close it now.
Not SCO with their frivolous lawsuit, not Microsoft with their billions in cash reserves, not silly US Patent law, not Digital Restrictions Management in BIOS; no one can stop it now - profit motive and customer demand are going to grind those things into the dust as surely as the automobile did to tack and harness shops.
The internet is global and the desktop is strategic. I mean military/industrial strategic - look at the Pacific rim and their government's backing of their own Linux distribution. Europe is more low key about it but they're equally pleased to have local boys making a more stable product and freeing them from possible NSA/CIA/FBI sanctioned intrusion.
GNU came into being when I was a highschool senior. I'm old enough now to have a child that is a highschool senior but I started reproducing later in life. I'm sure that by the time my son is a college freshman Microsoft's OS offerings will look as quaint as QEMM/386 or OS/2 looks today.
Drawing a blank on QEMM/386? Don't know who Quarterdeck is? Never actually seen OS/2? Both stories are instructive but OS/2 is probably the most relevant - what *IS* the fate of an overweight, closed OS when a more nimble competitor comes into the arena?
My CCNP and CCDP came due last November. I recertified with eight hours to spare. I don't recall what I got on the monolithic recertification exam but I should have read the Catalyst QoS book first - the router sims are going to weed out anyone that doesn't do this stuff all the time.
The CCNP/CCDP has been a meal ticket for me since I got it. I get paid again on the 28th and I'm going to take the BSCI exam as the first step towards completing my Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional.
I *am* unemployed. I hang around the house in my bunny slippers and wait for my cell phone to ring. I'm in the 53rd largest metro area in the US and so far it has rung a little over $6,000 worth of work in 2004. I fully expect to crack the $60k mark this year and I'm going to work about 800 hours to do that. Given the benefits of getting my money pretax I have a full time job pay wise and I'm only there forty percent of the time.
Oh, I should mention I do have the ideal complement skill for Cisco wizard - I am a BSD ninja, too. As a long time slashdot reader I realize that BSD is fragmented and dying:-) But it is a very lively corpse here and it continues to require my attention.
I passed the CCNA near the end of 1998. Its main value as far as I can tell is that it is placed within easy reach of the staff of small resellers. You sign a form and you're an authorized reseller, but if you have two CCNAs you're a Cisco Premier partner and you get access to some products that the authorized guys don't get to touch.
Once you've completed the CCNA and the companion Cisco Certified Design Associate you're ready to start on the Network and Design Professional (CCNP/CCDP) certifications. The three core exams are routing, switching, and remote access, then you take the troubleshooting for the Network Pro and the design exam for the Design Pro. I passed these at the end of 2000 and recently completed my three year recertification.
The CCNP/CCDP has been a huge career benefit for me. I've gone from Windows Flunky(tm) at crappy Fortune 500 companies to nothing but IOS and FreeBSD in my own business - life is sweet:-)
My next step is the carrier oriented Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional. Four exams covering routing, BGP, multicast, and I'm taking the MPLS specilization because the equipment needed for practice is inexpensive.
I find that the coursework and structure provided by the Cisco certifications is roughly equivalent to obtaining a masters degree in the field.
I'd expand more on the subject but that first CCIP exam is headed right at me:-)
So I get this refurbished IBM T20 from Foto Connection for $609. My first T20 has been acting psycho and I *hate* change - P700 is plenty fast enough for FBSD 4.9, I got all sorts of T20 gizmos around, so I chose to standardize.
The new machine shows up and its sweet - floppy, DVD, 12.0 gig drive, power supply. I also paid the $249 for a three year Repair Tech service contract.
All is good until I leave the machine running for about an hour - the 12.0 is whining like a cat in heat - obvious impending bearing failure.
I call Repair Tech first to find out if they'll cover a new 30.0 gig disk if I install it. I can't get a straight answer from them, they say call Foto Connection.
I call Foto Connection. They say they have a fourteen day return the whole machine warrantee and suggest I call IBM. At this point I'll point out to readers that in Alex Haley's 'Roots' the word 'foto' in Kunta Kinte's native language means 'penis'. This *will* be relevant in a minute.
I call IBM and after much IVR nonsense and leaving a voicemail a nice fellow named Clyde calls me, assures me that this machine was sold 'as is' to the purchaser, and would I like him to just conference them in so we can talk it over? Yay IBM! No service but they offer to cut right to the chase - abusing SCOX is not their only talent.
Once Foto (aka Penis) Connection is cornered they grudgingly agree to take the machine back and send me a new one. They can't just send a drive, no guaranteee I won't get another Horny Cat HD in a replacement unit, so I decide to write off the 12.0 gig - I'll probably add a nice, quiet 30 gig if I don't use the 20 gig from my other unit.
So at the end of the day I've got a T20 with a noisy drive and a dubious third party warrantee. Luckily dismantling the other T20 and replacing its miniPCI ethernet card seems to have cured it of whatever was ailing it. I've got production FBSD 4.9 on the new machine and the old one has been host to Knoppix (cool), FreeBSD 5.2RC (almost cooked), and OpenBSD 3.4 (jury out, mostly due to misbehavior of 3.4 code on Soekris machines) on a spare 3.0 gig disk.
I feel pretty pleased with what I've got at the end of the day - working machine on my desk, fairly trustworthy hot spare doubling as test box, but this could have been ugly if the original machine died completely and the warrantee turned out to be bunk, which might very well be the case.
Foo *and* bar on Foto(Penis) Connection and RepairTechInc - I'm going to check out IBM factory refurb + service when the second T20 finally breathes its last.
This has something of a law enforcement component to it but there is certainly a Baby Bell lobbyist in the mix somewhere. By making the requirement that VoIP be accessible for tapping it will limit the number of startups, while the truly criminal will simply encrypted their traffic.
Its sad but not surprising in today's climate. The US isn't what it once was - the largest threat to our way of life isn't al Queda - its our own sold out congress and behavior like this.
Canivore for the feds? I'm starting an open source project to hold my valuable IPAV app's intellectual property and I'm going to call it Moronivore... look for slashdot coverage soon.
It *is* a troll, but its clever - please mod up:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Right before WW II the German ambassador to Mexico (Zimmerman) offered them a share of the U.S. if they'd help Germany partition the country.
This is just as big and we all know how well Mr. Zimmer's efforts ended, don't we.
If I was more awake I'd draw parallels between Munich, appeasement, proxy wars, etc, but I just woke up
Damn right
I've been waiting for something like this - Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, etc will be playing 24x7 in my area
Gibson is great, so is Stephenson, but if you like either one of them you should branch out and read Vernor Vinge.
Vinge wrote True Names way back when - *the* seminal work for hacker culture.
That work alone would make the man's efforts worthwhile, but Across Realtime, A Fire On The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky just completely blow that one out of the water.
If Gibson is working with his personal binoculars focused on the future, Vinge is doing the same thing using his own personal mental Hubble Telescope.
Stop clicking that mouse, get up, and get yourself to a bookstore RIGHT NOW!!!
Is that 3,200 Autozone stores? Do they have jobber stores? APS had about 350 owned locations and 2,000 independents working under their banner.
SCO lost Autozone to IBM's Linux efforts. They're a huge auto parts distribution chain with about 6,000 stores the last time I looked - I used to work for a much smaller competitor of theirs that went bankrupt in the mid nineties.
m
Target has *within the last month* told SCO to go pound sand and done a deal with IBM for Linux conversion. I'm not sure how many locations they have - does anyone have that info handy? Please post if you do.
Sherwin Williams I know less about than either of the other two but IBM has helped SCO to the door there, too.
I hope Darl & company get prosecuted but I feel bad for the SCO troops - this is exactly the same behavior (pump & dump) I saw with the auto parts supplier where I worked in the mid nineties. I wrote a perl script that calculated severance for 4,000 employees and the scumbag behind the whole scheme went right into something much nicer than unemployment and vocational training:
http://www.corporateexpress.com/Mark_Hoffman.ht
I do an ls in my home directory and everything is fine. I do an 'ls -l' and I see stuff I deleted a long, long time ago. Other than this very disqueting discovery earlier today 5.2 has been sweet, solid, & flexible - sort of like dating an aerobics instructor. Maybe my troubles stem from a binary upgrade from 4.9 on this laptop, but somehow I don't think so
I think I'll play with some of my newly functional USB devices and try to ignore the filesystem stuff
Ethernet over power bridges from Netgear are something like $90/ea - that is $2,400 to do the whole thing and no exposure from wireless snoopers.
The model I have is XE102 and they seem to work just fine
VMS uptimes are due to it being cracked and then patched by the 'administrator', who wants no more downtime
type cluster_name::*.*;*
I mean really
Maybe those uptimes are load balancer => N=1 FreeBSD boxes.
FreeBSD still just rocks for overall uptime - I've gone four years without any trouble except on my much abused R&D boxes - the production stuff just keeps on producing
Despite the numerous BSD is Dying trolls on here, it seems to be quite a lively corpse.
I have half a dozen 4.9 servers, a couple of 5.2 laptops, and I'm playing with the Motorola 88k RISC port of OpenBSD trying to get it to load on an MVME187
One of these days I'll get all crazy and complete the family by putting NetBSD on my toaster oven
I'm provocative but I rarely troll - take time to understand the difference.
Read through the responses to that article and what do you see?
BOO HOOO WHOA IS ME *WHINE* *SNIFFLE* 'FREE' MUSIC 'FREE' VIDEOS (a tiny hint of rational thought) *SOB* HUH? EVIL CORPORATE URCHINS! HOW DARE THEY CHARGE *ME* FOR WHAT I USE? BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Here and there you find a lucky few who have a consumer grade high speed internet pipe that they share with a large number of people who use it as expected; they have occasional burst but 98% of the time their link is standing idle.
The rest of the 'typical' slashdot responders have endless energy to whine about how they are being abused by evil corporate powers who work so hard to provide them service.
I've heard the false advertising argument and I suppose its technically correct but everyone who makes it RICHLY DESERVES to have the high speed provider in their area fold. A few *hours* on analog service and they'd have some other leftist/socialist rant about how it is their god given right to an inexpensive consumer type high speed service that they can use like an expensive wholesale circuit WITHOUT paying for that level of service.
More trolling? Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as pointing out a more insidious problem than companies charging for the services they provide - the effects of forty years of fuzzy headed liberal thinking in the US are clearly visible in the poorly worded rants by Gen-Y members about their entitlement to carrier grade internet service for a fraction of the cost of providing it.
and you can tell I'm pissed when I make a post that contains a sentence fragment.
This isn't the second time this has been covered, its about the tenth in the last two years.
.16 = $160/mo divide that by half - $80/mo cost for my outflow bandwidth
... the silence is deafening ...
I'm not going to repeat my explanation of IP bandwidth costs *AGAIN* - just go read my journal - it is one of the first posts.
The attitude on here just amazes me - I pay $85/mo for two public IPs, 256k of upstream that I can use like a wholesale pipe (ie 24x7 101% utilized) and I have 3 meg of downstream. If I were younger and more flexible I'd be turning backflips in celebration of this.
When you buy a T1 worth of IP in a the form of a T1 you spend $200+ just for the local loop and the bandwidth itself costs $800 from a quality carrier all the way down to $400 from a third tier. Lets break down my 'expensive' broadband connection.
Half the cost is inflow, half is outflow.
256k/1.544 = 1.6 - $1000 *
3meg/1.5meg = 2 - $1000 * 2 = $2,000/mo divide that by half - $1,000 mo cost for my inflow bandwidth.
Now, can anyone tell me how Cox Cable makes money selling me $1,160 worth of service for $85? Its simple - they have a whole lot of business class customers like me who use the network in a bursty fashion. The technical term here is aggregation.
The typical slashdot responder who coyly dodges specifying that he has a god given right to steal music and video owned (right or wrong) by someone else, and jumps into arguments about false advertising, facist ISPs, and the like.
I think given the horrible way all of you are being treated that the solution should be obvious - pool your funds, pick the most vocal opponent of these policies, and let him spend your hard earned money on building a 'proper' broadband ISP.
Well dude, you're about to learn all about Fresnel zones.
You need to get a GPS reading from his house and from the location in the city where he wants to connect.
Line of site is a good start but 26 miles means you've got a first Fresnel zone radius of 77' at the midpoint and I used the cheater calculation that doesn't take earth curvature into account. If the Fresnel zone isn't clear you get signal loss - think of talking between two rooms with a door partially closed - the more closed the door, the louder you need to speak to be heard.
If the valley is long and flat does it have a river in the middle? Does it get fog? Hello, pathloss! That 22 mile shot I did runs colinear with the Missouri river and when we get airport closing fog that link loses half of its capacity.
Once you have the coordinates you need to examine the path - in the US we use DeLorme Topoquads for a quick and easy study of path geometry. I hear good things about Pathloss 4.0, but I can't afford toys like that.
Don't cost justify it based on Vonage VoIP service from back home. Telecom is a state monopoly in many countries and some of them having taken to legislating blocking of VoIP ports. If they aren't my experience is that south american ISPs generally try to maximize their queue depth
Bandwidth cost what it costs
So SCO agrees to fight a proxy war against Open Source/Free Software and comes under the pay of Microsoft.
...
They're going to get what every country that engages in a proxy war gets - their asses kicked, ruined infrastructure, and very little thanks at the end of the day. A few corrupt generals are lining their pockets. It *is* exactly like some little banana republic, isn't it?
Now the natives in the homeland of the paymaster in this war have been subverted and they begin attacking the proxy in this war - excellent move - gives M$ *another* huge black eye on the security front and their puppet state of SCO is on the receiving end.
I don't understand the problem - sure, fiaSCO will try to spin this as something IBM orchestrated, but is anyone listening? They've offended everyone in computing except the natives that live on the beach where Intel collects sand to make their silicon and I'm sure they'll get sued next over some 'fine grained' multitasking copyright SCO fantasizes that they have.
SCO's web server is probably on fire right now. I think it is a moral duty of all slashdot readers to promptly mirror that site with wget so we can help 'em rebuild after the attack dies down. Lets enter the necessary wget command, count three simultaneously, and then press enter
Well, you know the acronyms :-)
For every one who could write that there seem to be about two thousand who think 802.11 in their house directly scales to the same speeds for hundreds of users in a metro area.
It isn't wheat from chaff, Mr Electron Sir, its more like needle in a haystack - you, me, and a handful of others with radio.clue and legions of potential 11M operators on the other side of the aisle.
The 5800MHz radios we used were WiLan AWE-120 and they cost about $2k an end so its not something you're going to install just for fun. The AWE-120 is dead and the replacement is more expensive but its hardened for outdoor use and gets its power over ethernet - the installs are a lot cheaper this way.
I believe the antenna was an Andrew P2F - you can look at www.andrew.com for details. I recommened the Tesco catalog if you want info on antenna specs and such but you'll buy from eletro-comm.com. I've used a lot more RadioWaves antennas than Andrew - they're not as tight specs wise but they do a good job for a lot less.
If I can ask, where the heck are you going to do this? If you didn't already know this how did you find yourself in the position of designing a link like that?
I've got five moderator points this morning and there is exactly one post in here I'd mod up - the guy who suggested that people not post if they don't know anything, but he already has a +5.
There is a link in my sig to my journal and there you'll find a brief description of how 802.11 (wireless lan) and 802.16 (wireless access) differ.
50km == 30 miles. I've installed 2400MHz and 5800MHz links on the same 22 mile path and I've done a bunch of other 20 +/- 2 mile shots using 5800MHz.
At 22 miles with 19dB dishes on each end we saw analog modem speeds with 2400MHz (802.11b) equipment. Using 29dB 2' Andrew dishes and 100mw 5800MHz radios we saw a solid 5+ mbits on a radio that maxed out at 8 mbits.
I've planned a 40km 45 mbit shot for a project that didn't go through - I think we had a 4' dish on the remote tower and a 6' dish on the skyscraper end of the link.
Whatever band and modulation method they're using in these breathy 802.16 announcements the physics aren't going to be much different than what I describe above - long shots are point to point, cells are small (3km - 4km) if you want to go fast, and I mentally say "snake oil" when I hear the letters O-F-D-M. It works, but it ain't "all that", as they say.
So, mod me wise, or mod me troll, but know this: The slashdot collective has as much business talking about wireless networking as any room full of male gynecologists and cross dressers has talking about childbirth.
Linux is a kernel. GNU is an overall Unix replacement. GNU/HURD is a potential kernel replacement. BSD should be untainted by this and you've got three major and two minor varieties from which to choose, with FreeBSD being the easiest transition for Linux users.
The ecological niche here is *open* - even if Linux goes extinct over this, GNU+HURD or FreeBSD is going to slide right into that position, and if there is further trouble from the SCO camp I don't think *anyone* can impinge the likes of Plan9 or BeOS. Sure, it'll be a huge change, it might set us back another ten years, but Stallman opened Pandora's box a long time ago and no one is going to be able to close it now.
Not SCO with their frivolous lawsuit, not Microsoft with their billions in cash reserves, not silly US Patent law, not Digital Restrictions Management in BIOS; no one can stop it now - profit motive and customer demand are going to grind those things into the dust as surely as the automobile did to tack and harness shops.
The internet is global and the desktop is strategic. I mean military/industrial strategic - look at the Pacific rim and their government's backing of their own Linux distribution. Europe is more low key about it but they're equally pleased to have local boys making a more stable product and freeing them from possible NSA/CIA/FBI sanctioned intrusion.
GNU came into being when I was a highschool senior. I'm old enough now to have a child that is a highschool senior but I started reproducing later in life. I'm sure that by the time my son is a college freshman Microsoft's OS offerings will look as quaint as QEMM/386 or OS/2 looks today.
Drawing a blank on QEMM/386? Don't know who Quarterdeck is? Never actually seen OS/2? Both stories are instructive but OS/2 is probably the most relevant - what *IS* the fate of an overweight, closed OS when a more nimble competitor comes into the arena?
My CCNP and CCDP came due last November. I recertified with eight hours to spare. I don't recall what I got on the monolithic recertification exam but I should have read the Catalyst QoS book first - the router sims are going to weed out anyone that doesn't do this stuff all the time.
The CCNP/CCDP has been a meal ticket for me since I got it. I get paid again on the 28th and I'm going to take the BSCI exam as the first step towards completing my Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional.
I *am* unemployed. I hang around the house in my bunny slippers and wait for my cell phone to ring. I'm in the 53rd largest metro area in the US and so far it has rung a little over $6,000 worth of work in 2004. I fully expect to crack the $60k mark this year and I'm going to work about 800 hours to do that. Given the benefits of getting my money pretax I have a full time job pay wise and I'm only there forty percent of the time.
Oh, I should mention I do have the ideal complement skill for Cisco wizard - I am a BSD ninja, too. As a long time slashdot reader I realize that BSD is fragmented and dying
I passed the CCNA near the end of 1998. Its main value as far as I can tell is that it is placed within easy reach of the staff of small resellers. You sign a form and you're an authorized reseller, but if you have two CCNAs you're a Cisco Premier partner and you get access to some products that the authorized guys don't get to touch.
:-)
:-)
Once you've completed the CCNA and the companion Cisco Certified Design Associate you're ready to start on the Network and Design Professional (CCNP/CCDP) certifications. The three core exams are routing, switching, and remote access, then you take the troubleshooting for the Network Pro and the design exam for the Design Pro. I passed these at the end of 2000 and recently completed my three year recertification.
The CCNP/CCDP has been a huge career benefit for me. I've gone from Windows Flunky(tm) at crappy Fortune 500 companies to nothing but IOS and FreeBSD in my own business - life is sweet
My next step is the carrier oriented Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional. Four exams covering routing, BGP, multicast, and I'm taking the MPLS specilization because the equipment needed for practice is inexpensive.
I find that the coursework and structure provided by the Cisco certifications is roughly equivalent to obtaining a masters degree in the field.
I'd expand more on the subject but that first CCIP exam is headed right at me
So I get this refurbished IBM T20 from Foto Connection for $609. My first T20 has been acting psycho and I *hate* change - P700 is plenty fast enough for FBSD 4.9, I got all sorts of T20 gizmos around, so I chose to standardize.
The new machine shows up and its sweet - floppy, DVD, 12.0 gig drive, power supply. I also paid the $249 for a three year Repair Tech service contract.
All is good until I leave the machine running for about an hour - the 12.0 is whining like a cat in heat - obvious impending bearing failure.
I call Repair Tech first to find out if they'll cover a new 30.0 gig disk if I install it. I can't get a straight answer from them, they say call Foto Connection.
I call Foto Connection. They say they have a fourteen day return the whole machine warrantee and suggest I call IBM. At this point I'll point out to readers that in Alex Haley's 'Roots' the word 'foto' in Kunta Kinte's native language means 'penis'. This *will* be relevant in a minute.
I call IBM and after much IVR nonsense and leaving a voicemail a nice fellow named Clyde calls me, assures me that this machine was sold 'as is' to the purchaser, and would I like him to just conference them in so we can talk it over? Yay IBM! No service but they offer to cut right to the chase - abusing SCOX is not their only talent.
Once Foto (aka Penis) Connection is cornered they grudgingly agree to take the machine back and send me a new one. They can't just send a drive, no guaranteee I won't get another Horny Cat HD in a replacement unit, so I decide to write off the 12.0 gig - I'll probably add a nice, quiet 30 gig if I don't use the 20 gig from my other unit.
So at the end of the day I've got a T20 with a noisy drive and a dubious third party warrantee. Luckily dismantling the other T20 and replacing its miniPCI ethernet card seems to have cured it of whatever was ailing it. I've got production FBSD 4.9 on the new machine and the old one has been host to Knoppix (cool), FreeBSD 5.2RC (almost cooked), and OpenBSD 3.4 (jury out, mostly due to misbehavior of 3.4 code on Soekris machines) on a spare 3.0 gig disk.
I feel pretty pleased with what I've got at the end of the day - working machine on my desk, fairly trustworthy hot spare doubling as test box, but this could have been ugly if the original machine died completely and the warrantee turned out to be bunk, which might very well be the case.
Foo *and* bar on Foto(Penis) Connection and RepairTechInc - I'm going to check out IBM factory refurb + service when the second T20 finally breathes its last.
This has something of a law enforcement component to it but there is certainly a Baby Bell lobbyist in the mix somewhere. By making the requirement that VoIP be accessible for tapping it will limit the number of startups, while the truly criminal will simply encrypted their traffic.
Its sad but not surprising in today's climate. The US isn't what it once was - the largest threat to our way of life isn't al Queda - its our own sold out congress and behavior like this.
ping -l 666 -n 666 special.host.at.bestbuy.com
fsckin' DUH!
Canivore for the feds? I'm starting an open source project to hold my valuable IPAV app's intellectual property and I'm going to call it Moronivore
It *is* a troll, but its clever - please mod up