I can't reach the site you link to right now, but I know that anything that uses VHF is going to be slow. You can't get higher than modem speeds on VHF. Yeah, the range can't be beat (well, HF can beat it...;-) but you need microwaves like wifi 2.4 to get the nice megabit speeds. Sorry.
If you have any kind of hills at all wireless should be an option. Get a nice tall tower up on top of your local hill and put an omni antenna up there. Then, at each house, point a nice high gain antenna at the tower. That's the usual star design. If that doesn't cover it, you can bridge the network into multiple stars, create for example a backbone that jumps from the T1 to a tower then to other towers or well-located houses. It will be a LOT cheaper than running any kind of new cable given the distances you quoted. Wifi you can get the kit for each house as low as $200-$300 and put up a repeater with a couple of radios and antennas for $1000 or so.
The only mailing list that I know of dedicated to long-distance WiFi (802.11) links is wireless-longhaul. You can subscribe here. There's also a Wiki with plenty of links to projects that have successfully deployed long-distance wireless networks in all kinds of different places.
Don't go into proprietary wireless unless you absolutely have no other option. There's some interesting new technology that's already available e.g. from Alvarion, using OFDM you can make non-line of sight connections at microwave frequencies. Eventually there will be 802.16 standards for them but right now it's not ready yet. The proprietary solutions are many thousands of dollars for each box.
Also, it's statically typed. It's so.. annoying to have to typecast everything
Typecasting is a tool -- do you really trust the compiler to recognize exactly what you mean in every scenario, throughout your hundereds of thousands of lines of code? I don't want to have the compiler (or run-time environment, or interpreter, whatever) to "guess" at what I mean -- I want to tell it exactly what I mean.
Have you even used a dynamically typed language (like Objective-C or Smalltalk... ) ??? It sounds like the answer is no. Dynamic typing doesn't mean that you lose any ability to have the compiler help you out with the types of your variables. Instead you get the best of both world. With ObjC, you are perfectly free to specify the type of an object variable. If you try to assign it to another type, the compiler will issue a warning but compile anyway. You watch those warnings. If at runtime, the variable turns out to be the right type after all, everything works, if not, you get a runtime error. Maybe a crash, maybe not, depends on what you did.
So what's the gain? You get to write classes that can operate on any type WITHOUT having to deal with templates or generics. Let's say I have a SortedList class that I want to handle any object. In ObjC all I do is specify that the objects that are put into the SortedList MUST conform to a certain API -- they must have a "compare" method so that I can order them. Aside from that, thanks to dynamic typing and binding, I don't give a hoot what kind of type you give me, because all I'm gonna do is call "compare" on it and if that call works, I'm happy.
In fact, with dynamic typing, I can even check if the method "compare" is valid FIRST before I try to call it, at runtime, and handle any errors gracefully.
Don't dis something you don't understand. Dynamic typing rocks.
That is the problem with Open Source Software. There's no command structure, no CEO, no shareholders, nobody to 'officially' speak for us.
I'm not ready to say it's a strength, but I don't think it's a weakness either. Open source is the first culture that embodies the principles of the internet. The end-to-end principle is at work, when OSS (and FS) developers collaborate from other ends of the world, never meeting. OSS routes around damage by flaming lusers out of the community, trashing bad code, and constantly changing/improving the source base. OSS brings in the network effect to have many eyes make shallow bugs.
A leader would imply a single point of failure. While many people consider Linus to be a deity, he in fact does very little decision making himself and by his own words delegates as much as possible. RMS may be an important evangelist but it's his message not his personality... that matters.
I see OSS as being fundamentally decentralized. Who needs leaders? Everything is open for everyone to see, we don't need people to tell us what to think because we are all, constantly, broadcasting and then aggregating.
"How is it that today Canada is more free then the US?"
It's a matter of perspective. Americans are more narrowly perspected. They ask: "what will be the intended consequences of this action?" Canadians are more broadly perspected. They ask: "what will be the unintended consequences of this action?"
It's a petition by 31 prominent european computer scientists outlining in clear and concise language why software patents are a bad idea. (Here's some news coverage)
Basically what it boils down to are two things: - patents aren't needed because software is protected by copyright (unlike other patentable inventions, which can't be copyrighted) - patents on software will affect emphemeral methods and thoughts, culture and society...... well I can't explain it well. Read the letter it's only one page in plain english.
I just discovered that OS X comes with a keyboard layout that uses Dvorak but when you hold down Command (apple) key, uses QWERTY. That's great, because I'd hate to have to relearn all my keyboard shortcuts!
I tried to switch to switch to Dvorak back in my mudding days (pre-web time...) and failed. I relabelled my keys, spent time on exercises, everything. The whole point was that I couldn't type as fast as I wanted to on the MUD. The problem was that I was slower at first with dvorak... much slower. After an hour or so I'd get fed up and switch back to QWERTY (wow that's easy to type...) for the instant speed kick. Eventually, I gave up.
The commentary on this story is pissing me off. I thought slashdotters didn't like patents? Here's a perfectly good example of how to actually do something about it, and slashdotters are trying to shoot the messenger. Give me a break.
if there were strict software patent laws with very wide amendments regarding OSS implementations, the laws would effectively benefit OSS by discouraging proprietary implementations. The problem is that the strong IP advocates would never accept such wide amendments, except perhaps by mistake, as they would be their worst nightmare.
Yes... it does seem as though amendments that would give OSS exemption from software patents would actually give OSS an advantage vs. proprietary software. It would be like carte blanche to circumvent patent protection through OSS. Companies like IBM that earn all their money through service and support might do very well.
Does that throw a bit of a pall over the whole idea of special rules for OSS?
That doesn't sound too bad. As Perens and rest of us are very worried about the future of independent OSS developers, some kinds of amendments might make the patent laws reasonable. I don't know.
That's right.
But there is something that we do know. The rule in Europe right now is good, there's no software patents, there's no risk at all for individuals, SMEs, and open source in general. All of the good things that you speculate might come from this clause already exist.
I support Bruce on this, and also I support his position that he speaks for the OSS community far more than this Taylor person, who I've never heard of.
Here's a system that failed gracefully. Consider a simple taxonomy of software bugs: - you lose data - you corrupt data
The second one is far, far worse because the failure makes changes to your data and you know longer know what is right and what is wrong. The same situation maps onto this failure. The automatic primary system failed, and lost data. But it did not/corrupt/ data. A kernel panic serves exactly the same purpose. The kernel detects that it can no longer rely on itself, instead of continuing to operate it shuts down. The potential consequences of continuing in any form, might results in writing random or bad data to the hard drive, or who knows what else. It's better to system panic and stop doing anything.
notice how linux is being portrayed as the dog and SCO the underdog in this article? It's subtle, read between the lines and they way they describe people.
The RIAA stance is an easy one to defend in the eyes of the general populace.
Crap. No one in their right mind thinks that a bunch of students -- making NO PROFIT -- deserve to be thwacked $100 million. If this had ever made it to court, it could have made the RIAA look very bad for wanting all that money.
Unfortunately, this is the way it had to end-- the RIAA would lose face to the public if they went for criminal charges, and the $12-17k is a realistic warning to other file traders.
No, that's crap. This is not the way it had to end. If people with backbone had backed these students -- who were innocent -- they could have turned this into a landmark event. Instead, the students buckled and are paying just the right amount of money, enough to basically saddle most students with debt, but not enough for anyone to make a big public stink about. I'm not blaming these people per se, but I think that the anti-RIAA forces have a lot to think about since they obviously couln't take up the challenge here.
The future of digital video is the same as the future of digital audio. the big distribution companies will die, peer to peer will thrive, there will be greater variety available, more of the profit will go to the creative people rather than shareholders.
It's just a matter of Moore's Law. When terabyte hard drives and gigabit networks are common, you'll be swapping movies just like you swap songs today.
Anything else is just (as everyone else is saying about VOD) a distraction. The end to end principle will rule.
No, it's not really the airlines that are unhappy about cell phones on planes. It's the cell phone companies. Think about it.
Your cell phone can reach base stations that are many kilometers away. When you're on the ground, that's, like, a very limited number. But when you're up in the air, your phone can see hundreds, maybe thousands of base stations. That confuses the cell phone system and makes the companies upset. Also it makes your phone switch cells very rapidly and other bad effects.
Slashdot Mirror
How do they get that speed?
simon
link??? I'm interested.
I can't reach the site you link to right now, but I know that anything that uses VHF is going to be slow. You can't get higher than modem speeds on VHF. Yeah, the range can't be beat (well, HF can beat it ... ;-) but you need microwaves like wifi 2.4 to get the nice megabit speeds. Sorry.
simon
If you have any kind of hills at all wireless should be an option. Get a nice tall tower up on top of your local hill and put an omni antenna up there. Then, at each house, point a nice high gain antenna at the tower. That's the usual star design. If that doesn't cover it, you can bridge the network into multiple stars, create for example a backbone that jumps from the T1 to a tower then to other towers or well-located houses. It will be a LOT cheaper than running any kind of new cable given the distances you quoted. Wifi you can get the kit for each house as low as $200-$300 and put up a repeater with a couple of radios and antennas for $1000 or so.
The only mailing list that I know of dedicated to long-distance WiFi (802.11) links is wireless-longhaul. You can subscribe here. There's also a Wiki with plenty of links to projects that have successfully deployed long-distance wireless networks in all kinds of different places.
Don't go into proprietary wireless unless you absolutely have no other option. There's some interesting new technology that's already available e.g. from Alvarion, using OFDM you can make non-line of sight connections at microwave frequencies. Eventually there will be 802.16 standards for them but right now it's not ready yet. The proprietary solutions are many thousands of dollars for each box.
simon
Also, it's statically typed. It's so .. annoying to have to typecast everything
... ) ??? It sounds like the answer is no. Dynamic typing doesn't mean that you lose any ability to have the compiler help you out with the types of your variables. Instead you get the best of both world. With ObjC, you are perfectly free to specify the type of an object variable. If you try to assign it to another type, the compiler will issue a warning but compile anyway. You watch those warnings. If at runtime, the variable turns out to be the right type after all, everything works, if not, you get a runtime error. Maybe a crash, maybe not, depends on what you did.
Typecasting is a tool -- do you really trust the compiler to recognize exactly what you mean in every scenario, throughout your hundereds of thousands of lines of code? I don't want to have the compiler (or run-time environment, or interpreter, whatever) to "guess" at what I mean -- I want to tell it exactly what I mean.
Have you even used a dynamically typed language (like Objective-C or Smalltalk
So what's the gain? You get to write classes that can operate on any type WITHOUT having to deal with templates or generics. Let's say I have a SortedList class that I want to handle any object. In ObjC all I do is specify that the objects that are put into the SortedList MUST conform to a certain API -- they must have a "compare" method so that I can order them. Aside from that, thanks to dynamic typing and binding, I don't give a hoot what kind of type you give me, because all I'm gonna do is call "compare" on it and if that call works, I'm happy.
In fact, with dynamic typing, I can even check if the method "compare" is valid FIRST before I try to call it, at runtime, and handle any errors gracefully.
Don't dis something you don't understand. Dynamic typing rocks.
That is the problem with Open Source Software. There's no command structure, no CEO, no shareholders, nobody to 'officially' speak for us.
... that matters.
I'm not ready to say it's a strength, but I don't think it's a weakness either. Open source is the first culture that embodies the principles of the internet. The end-to-end principle is at work, when OSS (and FS) developers collaborate from other ends of the world, never meeting. OSS routes around damage by flaming lusers out of the community, trashing bad code, and constantly changing/improving the source base. OSS brings in the network effect to have many eyes make shallow bugs.
A leader would imply a single point of failure. While many people consider Linus to be a deity, he in fact does very little decision making himself and by his own words delegates as much as possible. RMS may be an important evangelist but it's his message not his personality
I see OSS as being fundamentally decentralized. Who needs leaders? Everything is open for everyone to see, we don't need people to tell us what to think because we are all, constantly, broadcasting and then aggregating.
simon
"How is it that today Canada is more free then the US?"
It's a matter of perspective. Americans are more narrowly perspected. They ask: "what will be the intended consequences of this action?" Canadians are more broadly perspected. They ask: "what will be the unintended consequences of this action?"
simon
;-)
simon
I particularly like this link that you posted:
... ... well I can't explain it well. Read the letter it's only one page in plain english.
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bengt/petition.pdf
It's a petition by 31 prominent european computer scientists outlining in clear and concise language why software patents are a bad idea. (Here's some news coverage)
Basically what it boils down to are two things:
- patents aren't needed because software is protected by copyright (unlike other patentable inventions, which can't be copyrighted)
- patents on software will affect emphemeral methods and thoughts, culture and society
simon
oh yeah, doh.
simon
I just discovered that OS X comes with a keyboard layout that uses Dvorak but when you hold down Command (apple) key, uses QWERTY. That's great, because I'd hate to have to relearn all my keyboard shortcuts!
simon
I tried to switch to switch to Dvorak back in my mudding days (pre-web time...) and failed. I relabelled my keys, spent time on exercises, everything. The whole point was that I couldn't type as fast as I wanted to on the MUD. The problem was that I was slower at first with dvorak ... much slower. After an hour or so I'd get fed up and switch back to QWERTY (wow that's easy to type...) for the instant speed kick. Eventually, I gave up.
simon
The commentary on this story is pissing me off. I thought slashdotters didn't like patents? Here's a perfectly good example of how to actually do something about it, and slashdotters are trying to shoot the messenger. Give me a break.
simon
if there were strict software patent laws with very wide amendments regarding OSS implementations, the laws would effectively benefit OSS by discouraging proprietary implementations. The problem is that the strong IP advocates would never accept such wide amendments, except perhaps by mistake, as they would be their worst nightmare.
... it does seem as though amendments that would give OSS exemption from software patents would actually give OSS an advantage vs. proprietary software. It would be like carte blanche to circumvent patent protection through OSS. Companies like IBM that earn all their money through service and support might do very well.
Yes
Does that throw a bit of a pall over the whole idea of special rules for OSS?
simon
1. Software patents are currently not allowed in Europe.
That means, that in Europe there is no Amazon One-Click patent, no SCO lawsuit, no Charles Northrup or this, this, another one from Bezos patenting web ads, a Bezos patent on discussing products online, software versioning, submarine patents, AOL...
2. This law will allow software patents if it passes.
3. It has a clause that would monitor the effects on OSS, and maybe, if negative effects are decided to be happening, try to limit those effects.
4. Some dude nobody's ever heard of claimed to represent OSS community and said it's a good idea.
5. Some other dude said the dude in 4 is full of it in a posting on his home page.
6. said posting got slashdotted
7. You are here.
precisely
That doesn't sound too bad. As Perens and rest of us are very worried about the future of independent OSS developers, some kinds of amendments might make the patent laws reasonable. I don't know.
That's right.
But there is something that we do know. The rule in Europe right now is good, there's no software patents, there's no risk at all for individuals, SMEs, and open source in general. All of the good things that you speculate might come from this clause already exist.
simon
I support Bruce on this, and also I support his position that he speaks for the OSS community far more than this Taylor person, who I've never heard of.
simon
Here's a system that failed gracefully. Consider a simple taxonomy of software bugs:
/corrupt/ data. A kernel panic serves exactly the same purpose. The kernel detects that it can no longer rely on itself, instead of continuing to operate it shuts down. The potential consequences of continuing in any form, might results in writing random or bad data to the hard drive, or who knows what else. It's better to system panic and stop doing anything.
- you lose data
- you corrupt data
The second one is far, far worse because the failure makes changes to your data and you know longer know what is right and what is wrong. The same situation maps onto this failure. The automatic primary system failed, and lost data. But it did not
Code that fails gracefully is good code.
simon
Couldn't they have been bothered to animate the mouths? I mean, it's just really distracting and it seems like it would be such an easy thing to do.
simon
notice how linux is being portrayed as the dog and SCO the underdog in this article? It's subtle, read between the lines and they way they describe people.
That's a pretty remarkable change, donchya?
simon
The RIAA stance is an easy one to defend in the eyes of the general populace.
Crap. No one in their right mind thinks that a bunch of students -- making NO PROFIT -- deserve to be thwacked $100 million. If this had ever made it to court, it could have made the RIAA look very bad for wanting all that money.
simon
Unfortunately, this is the way it had to end-- the RIAA would lose face to the public if they went for criminal charges, and the $12-17k is a realistic warning to other file traders.
No, that's crap. This is not the way it had to end. If people with backbone had backed these students -- who were innocent -- they could have turned this into a landmark event. Instead, the students buckled and are paying just the right amount of money, enough to basically saddle most students with debt, but not enough for anyone to make a big public stink about. I'm not blaming these people per se, but I think that the anti-RIAA forces have a lot to think about since they obviously couln't take up the challenge here.
simon
The future of digital video is the same as the future of digital audio. the big distribution companies will die, peer to peer will thrive, there will be greater variety available, more of the profit will go to the creative people rather than shareholders.
It's just a matter of Moore's Law. When terabyte hard drives and gigabit networks are common, you'll be swapping movies just like you swap songs today.
Anything else is just (as everyone else is saying about VOD) a distraction. The end to end principle will rule.
simon
"...but is that paranoia justified?"
No, it's not really the airlines that are unhappy about cell phones on planes. It's the cell phone companies. Think about it.
Your cell phone can reach base stations that are many kilometers away. When you're on the ground, that's, like, a very limited number. But when you're up in the air, your phone can see hundreds, maybe thousands of base stations. That confuses the cell phone system and makes the companies upset. Also it makes your phone switch cells very rapidly and other bad effects.
It's a cell phone thing.
simon