What is "The Cloud"? A symbol on a network diagram? - I'm sure that's how it started. The way I see it "The Cloud" is just a name massively over-hyped by marketing folk for a hosted server that you have no clue about where it is. I totally get the concept of being able to access your data everywhere and it's a great concept. It doesn't always work. Usually failing when needed the most.
There is a Cloud Computing Concept that I do trust It's called Private Cloud Computing. There is really nothing new about it. We have all been doing it for ages. Its just simply running your own server. Most business do this and you can do this your self with your own server plus the aid of today's modern high speed internet connections. If your internet fails you still have access to your data.
I personally don't trust "The Cloud". Think about it for a moment. You are putting your data on a server and you have no clue as to where it is. You have no clue about who else is able to see that data and you have no clue about who is watching as you access your data and probably no clue if that server is up to date on security patches.
Yes its cool that you can access it everywhere accept oh.. There's no cell coverage here and oh the free wifi might not be secure and oh I've been hacked.
Cloud backups? yeah right. I wonder how long it will take to backup my 3TB of videos to the cloud? I wonder how long it will take to restore them if a HDD should fail. I wonder if cloud backups count towards my broadband data cap? Large numbers of ISP's operate data capping the average is 100Gig per month. At that rate it would take 30 months to backup your data and 30 months to get it back. What if the cloud backup gets hacked, how do I know my data is safe?
The short answer is you don't know if your data is safe. If you have sensitive data, its best not to put it on a server connected to the internet. So Yes I may be a server hugger, but I know where my data is. I know where the backups are and I know my secure data is and its not stored in a place directly accessible to the internet.
Microsoft Don't seem to: For those who have just arrived on planet Earth: Microsoft are making more money from being a patent troll selling Android licenses than they ever were from they're own windows 7 phone OS. Microsoft don't own ARM so what difference does it make that they are locking down their own bootloader? Does it really matter? Why buy a windows phone if all you want to do is hack it, there are plenty of other phones that are hackable if that's what you want to do. What's the big deal here?
Its not the cheapest of options, but it just works so well, with a front facing camera and 1280x800 pixels of screen all in something that does actually fit in your pocket. You can fit a 32gig microsd card so no problems with carrying your entertainment with you, it has 16 gig internal emmc 11gig usable for storage, so you won't loose all your settings if you do change sd cards all the time. The fact that it is a fully functioning phone (all be it a little large) that said its no bigger than some of the early windows mobile PDA's of yesteryear. Its totally rootable, I have root on mine:) As far as I know its the only android device to have a wacom pen (I'm assuming its wacom, because the pen from my bamboo tablet works with it) Its very happy to play virtually anything I throw at it even 1080p h264, which its capable of recording from its own camera. With an MHL adaptor which can now be found cheaply on ebay you can play back your 1080p video on your high def TV or just use the samsung all share app to push content to your dnla device / tv
Downsides: 2 bad things I've found
1) Samsung feel that you MUST know when the battery is fully charged, even if its 2 o clock in the morning the device still proudly announces beep beep - "My battery is now fully charged you can unplug the charger" Having got root the first thing I did was rename the sample.
2) It comes shipped with vlingo for voice control. For me this is the worst voice control app I've ever used, it just doesn't work with my middle (some might say posh) english accent. Whats worse is that it doesn't do any processing on the phone, like siri your voice sample is uploaded to the cloud, processed (badly) then sent back to the phone, a process that takes up to 30 seconds depending on 3g coverage. Whereas the app that comes default with cyanogen and miui rom builds, just works, doesn't use the cloud and gets it right 95% of the time, even through a bluetooth handsfree kit. Worse still samsung have made this app non removable, the only way I was able to remove this was with titanium backup after rooting. (Note at the time of writing cyanogen and miui roms are not available for the note, but are for the galaxy s 2)
These problems are exactly the same with the samsung galaxy s 2 phone.
Has anyone considered all the arcing and sparking that simple on / off / circuit breakers will have to deal with? At least with AC you have a chance that the switch will be opened or closed at the zero crossing period and that AC makes it harder to draw arcs when breaking a circuit.
I'm not sure its really going to present any more effeciancy. I guess if you use a 3 phase site rectifier then it will save you the cost of 3 phase copper and make the server power supplies cheaper. Not forgetting that you could actually plug an unmodified server directly into 384V DC (so long as the psu is set to 240v). I guess the days of computers using 60hz as a reference are over:)
I love this, The Incredibles is a great Movie. Did anyone know that Edna is voiced by a guy? Back to the topic, my glasses have UV filters in them, I have a UV laser pointer, with my glasses on it produces a Dim blue light, without them I can see the beam produced by the laser. UV lasers are fun things to shine around the garden at night, flowers glow brightly in unexpected colours. The other fun thing to do with UV laser pointers is to graffiti up glow in the dark fire exit signs, I bought a sheet of glow paper and you can write on it with the laser pointer.
I guess a UV laser pointer may not be the best thing to play with if you have no natural UV filtering in your eyes
Be careful. Quite a lot of modern smoke detectors use LED light beams to detect smoke. These will not trigger much of a reading from your Geiger Counter
I found 2 differences: 1) The more expensive cables look cooler than the cheap ones 2) The more expensive cables are a little more durable, I've had some cheap cables fall apart / break off Mostly its the cheap cables that try to look expensive that are the worst kind, those that are so thick you need pipe bending tools to bend them. The thin molded ones work great.
This whole argument has rather been done to death hasn't it?
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about, the cell towers have to know roughly where you are in order to route your calls, sms messages and even to make your phone ring. The only difference I can see is that this info is now being stored on your phone, why is that a problem? We are all carrying round this bit of grey matter which is doing the exact same thing.
It is still just possible to not be tracked if you follow this advice. Don't use a credit card, and don't use a cell phone, don't even carry one, and don't use social networking of any kind, don't use any store based loyalty cards, don't have or use a bank account, buy everything with cash, work strictly cash in hand for someone who doesn't want or need to see your national insurance number or social security number, don't use or own a car use public transport instead, never fly anywhere, don't have any subscription based TV or radio services in fact don't have any subscription services such as land line phone or internet, Don't respond to any mail that drops through your door. In fact it might be best to be homeless or sleep in a tent.
Get Real people, just about everything we do in modern life allows us to be tracked in some way or other, why should a cache file used to help the phone and its application know roughly where it is make any difference?
If you are not breaking the law then you have nothing to hide. If you are breaking the law then be worried, be worried about the fact that we are all leaving DNA trails behind us all the time in the form of skin particulates and hairs. Be very worried because big brother is watching and recording, but also know that if you are not in the spotlight then he doesn't care.
It really bugs the hell out of me the way manufacturers like sony and asus have the cheek to put out a laptop with a 1440x900 screen or a 1600x900 screen and call it "Full HD". As far as I'm concerned Full HD is 1080 pixels vertical and 1920 pixels horizontal, since when does 900 = 1080 and 1440 = 1920????? Unsatisfied with the screen res on my laptop I decided to upgrade it myself. Luckily after a long phone call to a supplier, I was able to convince them to send me a 1920x1200 LCD panel that was a direct replacement for the 1440x900 panel, They told me it was unlikely to work, but it works great:) If anyone is interested I used a panel designed for a sony and fitted it to an asus g70. It cost me about 160ukp for the panel and about an hour to fit. I was able to try my g70 on a 1920x1200 panel first to see if it would drive it. Most LVDS LCD panels are interchangeable provided that they use the same backlighting technology. Size and aspect ratio can be an issue too. I'm sure that case modders could make even a screen of totally the wrong aspect look ok. I guess it boils down to having the bottle to mod your brand new laptop. Yeah yeah I know someone is going to reply telling me the g70 is 2 years old, well simplyasus were selling off old stock cheaply, so I got a bargain.
Standing Wave Ratio is a measure of how much of the signal that you trying to fire out of an antenna is being reflected back. A low SWR is an indication that most of your transmitting power is actually being delivered to your antenna. I find it so hard to believe that anyone would have designed a hand held radio that lets the antenna come in contact with the human that's holding it. Its bad enough to have capacitive coupling (Where the plastic casing is thin enough to allow the signal to be transfered to the user). If you think about it most hand held radios (walky-talkies) have their antenna's in the end of a stick. Its only as phones have become small that this stick has become small too and as such produces concentrated RF emissions right next to your head. As a result manufacturers mostly place the gsm antenna at the bottom of the phone.
Most antennas have a hot end (usually the tip) its high voltage low current and a cold end (usually the base) low voltage high current.
Is it purely down to detuning or just a plane short circuit?
I've seen demo's on youtube that show an actual call being dropped, no amount of s-meter recalibration is going to fix that.
It would be interesting to see if the part of the side antenna that is (so say) shorting is the hot end or the cold end. If its the hot end then the problem may well be caused by the bluetooth or wifi radio actually swamping the gsm radio receiver. This could be fixed in software by detecting that the phone is being held (somehow) and turning off the wifi or bluetooth whilst in a call. This could be made to come into play only in a poor signal area. (sorry to those of you in the know. Being a HTC user I'm not sure which side the wifi / bluetooth is on)
If its the cold end that is shorting then the best answer is a bumper. I'm sure it won't take long for these to be appearing very cheaply in ebay.
Pick a picture, zoom it, then rotate the phone, now enjoy the splendour that is pitch black. It does seem quicker though, have to see what the battery life is like.
We have RFID secured doors at work, if you have 2 or more of them near the sensor it doesn't work. Its the old thing about 2 radios transmitting at the same time jamming each other.
As a UK resident and IT specialist I've seen the this silly browser ballot thing rather allot. I've found that it just confuses users. Its a great way to install other browsers, but it doesn't uninstall IE if you choose a different one. Whats really stupid is the way that if you choose IE from the list it tries to download and install IE even if its already on your system. I just tell folks who are happy with IE to delete it. If most people are doing this it would account for the low IE results.
What could be more dangerious than having to take one hand off the wheel and coordinate is with a leg pressing down a peddel, all whist driving at speed.
It has to said that there is a huge difference between KDE in Ubuntu and KDE in Debian. Why? I don't know, but things like wireless work in Debian and do not in Kubuntu, yet Ubuntu's wireless works like a charm.
There's no denying that Ubuntu is a awesome distro, but is does make you wonder if Kubuntu has been put out there to diswade folks from using KDE, intentional or not, that is the effect its having.
I would say to anyone frustrated after having tried KDE in the form of Kubuntu that its well worth trying a different distro, not just Debian (I might add)
I came across this problem months ago when I used 2 freeagent 750gb drives as part of a backup solution. I tried the above solution, but it didn't work correctly for me, I have a cron job that does an rsync backup and a human that swaps the drives every 2 days.
To be effective the above solution needs to be run as soon as you plug in the drive ie before the drive goes to sleep.
The way I got round it was to buy a cheap usbsata enclosures from ebay, cracked open the freeagent (which contains a normal sata drive) and installed the drive into el-cheapo ebay enclosures.
Problem solved with the added bonus that I can now have my human drive changer tell if the drive is in use and not change it if they see that flashing blue LED.
I used to think that Seagate had the edge on hard disk technology now I'm not so sure, anyone noticed how hot their drives run? even the 7200 rpm ones??
Its more likely that the RF from the phone is swamping the pickup used to power the key. If someone has left out the protection diode then the large amount of RF from the phone could damage the keys transponder simply due to over voltage.
Its a bit like then your kid fries his electronic toy because he didn't check the setting on the cheap 3-24v power supply you got him because you didn't want to keep spending out on batterys
I guess the diffenence is that instead of not hearing the annoying sounds from the toy you can't drive your car.
This says alot about nissan doesn't it (Hmm lets save a few cents by leaving out this diode, the transponder seems to work without it)
There are many old 802.11a access points available on ebay for very little money. The Proxim ones can be flashed with a web interface rather than the telnet based one they arrive with. I have one here and it works great, once setup just plug into your router and go. Of course you will need an 802.11a capable card for your laptop. I was able to find a minipci intel dual band one for about $20.
Good points: 802.11a has more channels than b/g 802.11a less range and is more effected by walls etc meaning less interference Its 5.2Ghz so your 5.8Ghz phone is not going to interfere Reasonablely inexpencive
Bad points: The Proxim I got doesn't support wpa-psk so only with a radius server can you use wpa You need a 802.11a radio to use it, although dual band radios are getting to be more common, they are still not that common. The signal doesn't go as far, you'll need more access points to cover an area.
Slashdot Mirror
What is "The Cloud"?
A symbol on a network diagram? - I'm sure that's how it started.
The way I see it "The Cloud" is just a name massively over-hyped by marketing folk for a hosted server that you have no clue about where it is.
I totally get the concept of being able to access your data everywhere and it's a great concept. It doesn't always work. Usually failing when needed the most.
There is a Cloud Computing Concept that I do trust It's called Private Cloud Computing. There is really nothing new about it. We have all been doing it for ages.
Its just simply running your own server. Most business do this and you can do this your self with your own server plus the aid of today's modern high speed internet connections.
If your internet fails you still have access to your data.
I personally don't trust "The Cloud". Think about it for a moment. You are putting your data on a server and you have no clue as to where it is. You have no clue about who else is able to see that data and you have no clue about who is watching as you access your data and probably no clue if that server is up to date on security patches.
Yes its cool that you can access it everywhere accept oh.. There's no cell coverage here and oh the free wifi might not be secure and oh I've been hacked.
Cloud backups? yeah right. I wonder how long it will take to backup my 3TB of videos to the cloud? I wonder how long it will take to restore them if a HDD should fail. I wonder if cloud backups count towards my broadband data cap? Large numbers of ISP's operate data capping the average is 100Gig per month. At that rate it would take 30 months to backup your data and 30 months to get it back.
What if the cloud backup gets hacked, how do I know my data is safe?
The short answer is you don't know if your data is safe. If you have sensitive data, its best not to put it on a server connected to the internet.
So Yes I may be a server hugger, but I know where my data is. I know where the backups are and I know my secure data is and its not stored in a place directly accessible to the internet.
Microsoft Don't seem to:
For those who have just arrived on planet Earth: Microsoft are making more money from being a patent troll selling Android licenses than they ever were from they're own windows 7 phone OS.
Microsoft don't own ARM so what difference does it make that they are locking down their own bootloader?
Does it really matter? Why buy a windows phone if all you want to do is hack it, there are plenty of other phones that are hackable if that's what you want to do.
What's the big deal here?
Its not the cheapest of options, but it just works so well, with a front facing camera and 1280x800 pixels of screen all in something that does actually fit in your pocket. You can fit a 32gig microsd card so no problems with carrying your entertainment with you, it has 16 gig internal emmc 11gig usable for storage, so you won't loose all your settings if you do change sd cards all the time. The fact that it is a fully functioning phone (all be it a little large) that said its no bigger than some of the early windows mobile PDA's of yesteryear. Its totally rootable, I have root on mine :) As far as I know its the only android device to have a wacom pen (I'm assuming its wacom, because the pen from my bamboo tablet works with it) Its very happy to play virtually anything I throw at it even 1080p h264, which its capable of recording from its own camera.
With an MHL adaptor which can now be found cheaply on ebay you can play back your 1080p video on your high def TV or just use the samsung all share app to push content to your dnla device / tv
Downsides: 2 bad things I've found
1) Samsung feel that you MUST know when the battery is fully charged, even if its 2 o clock in the morning the device still proudly announces beep beep - "My battery is now fully charged you can unplug the charger" Having got root the first thing I did was rename the sample.
2) It comes shipped with vlingo for voice control. For me this is the worst voice control app I've ever used, it just doesn't work with my middle (some might say posh) english accent. Whats worse is that it doesn't do any processing on the phone, like siri your voice sample is uploaded to the cloud, processed (badly) then sent back to the phone, a process that takes up to 30 seconds depending on 3g coverage. Whereas the app that comes default with cyanogen and miui rom builds, just works, doesn't use the cloud and gets it right 95% of the time, even through a bluetooth handsfree kit. Worse still samsung have made this app non removable, the only way I was able to remove this was with titanium backup after rooting.
(Note at the time of writing cyanogen and miui roms are not available for the note, but are for the galaxy s 2)
These problems are exactly the same with the samsung galaxy s 2 phone.
Wear a Virtual T-Shirt
At 666 Euros they can keep it too.
I'm not sure you are getting my point. 48vdc != 384vdc
Has anyone considered all the arcing and sparking that simple on / off / circuit breakers will have to deal with? At least with AC you have a chance that the switch will be opened or closed at the zero crossing period and that AC makes it harder to draw arcs when breaking a circuit.
I'm not sure its really going to present any more effeciancy. I guess if you use a 3 phase site rectifier then it will save you the cost of 3 phase copper and make the server power supplies cheaper. Not forgetting that you could actually plug an unmodified server directly into 384V DC (so long as the psu is set to 240v). :)
I guess the days of computers using 60hz as a reference are over
I love this, The Incredibles is a great Movie. Did anyone know that Edna is voiced by a guy?
Back to the topic, my glasses have UV filters in them, I have a UV laser pointer, with my glasses on it produces a Dim blue light, without them I can see the beam produced by the laser. UV lasers are fun things to shine around the garden at night, flowers glow brightly in unexpected colours.
The other fun thing to do with UV laser pointers is to graffiti up glow in the dark fire exit signs, I bought a sheet of glow paper and you can write on it with the laser pointer.
I guess a UV laser pointer may not be the best thing to play with if you have no natural UV filtering in your eyes
Be careful. Quite a lot of modern smoke detectors use LED light beams to detect smoke. These will not trigger much of a reading from your Geiger Counter
I found 2 differences:
1) The more expensive cables look cooler than the cheap ones
2) The more expensive cables are a little more durable, I've had some cheap cables fall apart / break off Mostly its the cheap cables that try to look expensive that are the worst kind, those that are so thick you need pipe bending tools to bend them. The thin molded ones work great.
This whole argument has rather been done to death hasn't it?
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about...
It's an Apple story.
But its an android story too
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about, the cell towers have to know roughly where you are in order to route your calls, sms messages and even to make your phone ring. The only difference I can see is that this info is now being stored on your phone, why is that a problem? We are all carrying round this bit of grey matter which is doing the exact same thing.
It is still just possible to not be tracked if you follow this advice.
Don't use a credit card, and don't use a cell phone, don't even carry one, and don't use social networking of any kind, don't use any store based loyalty cards, don't have or use a bank account, buy everything with cash, work strictly cash in hand for someone who doesn't want or need to see your national insurance number or social security number, don't use or own a car use public transport instead, never fly anywhere, don't have any subscription based TV or radio services in fact don't have any subscription services such as land line phone or internet, Don't respond to any mail that drops through your door. In fact it might be best to be homeless or sleep in a tent.
Get Real people, just about everything we do in modern life allows us to be tracked in some way or other, why should a cache file used to help the phone and its application know roughly where it is make any difference?
If you are not breaking the law then you have nothing to hide. If you are breaking the law then be worried, be worried about the fact that we are all leaving DNA trails behind us all the time in the form of skin particulates and hairs. Be very worried because big brother is watching and recording, but also know that if you are not in the spotlight then he doesn't care.
It really bugs the hell out of me the way manufacturers like sony and asus have the cheek to put out a laptop with a 1440x900 screen or a 1600x900 screen and call it "Full HD". As far as I'm concerned Full HD is 1080 pixels vertical and 1920 pixels horizontal, since when does 900 = 1080 and 1440 = 1920????? :) If anyone is interested I used a panel designed for a sony and fitted it to an asus g70. It cost me about 160ukp for the panel and about an hour to fit. I was able to try my g70 on a 1920x1200 panel first to see if it would drive it. Most LVDS LCD panels are interchangeable provided that they use the same backlighting technology.
Unsatisfied with the screen res on my laptop I decided to upgrade it myself.
Luckily after a long phone call to a supplier, I was able to convince them to send me a 1920x1200 LCD panel that was a direct replacement for the 1440x900 panel, They told me it was unlikely to work, but it works great
Size and aspect ratio can be an issue too. I'm sure that case modders could make even a screen of totally the wrong aspect look ok. I guess it boils down to having the bottle to mod your brand new laptop. Yeah yeah I know someone is going to reply telling me the g70 is 2 years old, well simplyasus were selling off old stock cheaply, so I got a bargain.
Standing Wave Ratio is a measure of how much of the signal that you trying to fire out of an antenna is being reflected back.
A low SWR is an indication that most of your transmitting power is actually being delivered to your antenna.
I find it so hard to believe that anyone would have designed a hand held radio that lets the antenna come in contact with the human that's holding it.
Its bad enough to have capacitive coupling (Where the plastic casing is thin enough to allow the signal to be transfered to the user).
If you think about it most hand held radios (walky-talkies) have their antenna's in the end of a stick. Its only as phones have become small that this stick has become small too and as such produces concentrated RF emissions right next to your head. As a result manufacturers mostly place the gsm antenna at the bottom of the phone.
Most antennas have a hot end (usually the tip) its high voltage low current and a cold end (usually the base) low voltage high current.
Is it purely down to detuning or just a plane short circuit?
I've seen demo's on youtube that show an actual call being dropped, no amount of s-meter recalibration is going to fix that.
It would be interesting to see if the part of the side antenna that is (so say) shorting is the hot end or the cold end. If its the hot end then the problem may well be caused by the bluetooth or wifi radio actually swamping the gsm radio receiver. This could be fixed in software by detecting that the phone is being held (somehow) and turning off the wifi or bluetooth whilst in a call. This could be made to come into play only in a poor signal area.
(sorry to those of you in the know. Being a HTC user I'm not sure which side the wifi / bluetooth is on)
If its the cold end that is shorting then the best answer is a bumper. I'm sure it won't take long for these to be appearing very cheaply in ebay.
Pick a picture, zoom it, then rotate the phone, now enjoy the splendour that is pitch black.
It does seem quicker though, have to see what the battery life is like.
We have RFID secured doors at work, if you have 2 or more of them near the sensor it doesn't work. Its the old thing about 2 radios transmitting at the same time jamming each other.
As a UK resident and IT specialist I've seen the this silly browser ballot thing rather allot.
I've found that it just confuses users.
Its a great way to install other browsers, but it doesn't uninstall IE if you choose a different one.
Whats really stupid is the way that if you choose IE from the list it tries to download and install IE even if its already on your system.
I just tell folks who are happy with IE to delete it. If most people are doing this it would account for the low IE results.
What could be more dangerious than having to take one hand off the wheel and coordinate is with a leg pressing down a peddel, all whist driving at speed.
Yes,
The latest Linux kernel 2.6.28 has a bug with regards to laptop screen brightness its sort of inverted.
This did not happen with 2.6.27.10
Instead of history you can type ^r (ctrl r) in bash.
It will perform a search as you type within history assuming you have any to seaarch.
puercopop@localhost ~ $ which which
which: no which in (/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.1.2:/usr/qt/3/bin:/usr/games/bin)
Burn her anyway!
tv@Anubis:~$ which which
/usr/bin/which
did I miss something?
Its an actual command on my system
It has to said that there is a huge difference between KDE in Ubuntu and KDE in Debian. Why? I don't know, but things like wireless work in Debian and do not in Kubuntu, yet Ubuntu's wireless works like a charm.
There's no denying that Ubuntu is a awesome distro, but is does make you wonder if Kubuntu has been put out there to diswade folks from using KDE, intentional or not, that is the effect its having.
I would say to anyone frustrated after having tried KDE in the form of Kubuntu that its well worth trying a different distro, not just Debian (I might add)
I came across this problem months ago when I used 2 freeagent 750gb drives as part of a backup solution. I tried the above solution, but it didn't work correctly for me, I have a cron job that does an rsync backup and a human that swaps the drives every 2 days.
To be effective the above solution needs to be run as soon as you plug in the drive ie before the drive goes to sleep.
The way I got round it was to buy a cheap usbsata enclosures from ebay, cracked open the freeagent (which contains a normal sata drive) and installed the drive into el-cheapo ebay enclosures.
Problem solved with the added bonus that I can now have my human drive changer tell if the drive is in use and not change it if they see that flashing blue LED.
I used to think that Seagate had the edge on hard disk technology now I'm not so sure, anyone noticed how hot their drives run? even the 7200 rpm ones??
Its more likely that the RF from the phone is swamping the pickup used to power the key. If someone has left out the protection diode then the large amount of RF from the phone could damage the keys transponder simply due to over voltage.
:P
Its a bit like then your kid fries his electronic toy because he didn't check the setting on the cheap 3-24v power supply you got him because you didn't want to keep spending out on batterys
I guess the diffenence is that instead of not hearing the annoying sounds from the toy you can't drive your car.
This says alot about nissan doesn't it (Hmm lets save a few cents by leaving out this diode, the transponder seems to work without it)
BTW I am a nissan car owner
There are many old 802.11a access points available on ebay for very little money.
The Proxim ones can be flashed with a web interface rather than the telnet based one they arrive with.
I have one here and it works great, once setup just plug into your router and go.
Of course you will need an 802.11a capable card for your laptop. I was able to find a minipci intel dual band one for about $20.
Good points:
802.11a has more channels than b/g
802.11a less range and is more effected by walls etc meaning less interference
Its 5.2Ghz so your 5.8Ghz phone is not going to interfere
Reasonablely inexpencive
Bad points:
The Proxim I got doesn't support wpa-psk so only with a radius server can you use wpa
You need a 802.11a radio to use it, although dual band radios are getting to be more common, they are still not that common.
The signal doesn't go as far, you'll need more access points to cover an area.