I have three of them -- two PS/2 (different models) and one USB that the RatShack guy swore he wasn't supposed to give me unless I bought a computer. I agree -- they're pretty useless. It's mildly interesting technically, but really...
The funny thing about hacking the little beasts was that while it was possible to more or less duplicate the official CRQ bar codes, there was little point. It was a bad design and there was nothing the "standard" (i.e. anything but) barcodes could do that couldn't be duplicated with a Code 39 font, even a demo version with only numbers. (The funny thing was that the CueCat was capable of handling a rather large number of different code schemes, but Digital Convergence didn't publicize that.)
I've wondered the same thing, though "callsign" has a somewhat different meaning in aviation than in radio.
Yeah, the US has a rather large chunk of namespace. A and N seem to be mostly used by military and amateur stations -- almost everything else is W and K. Usually if you buy a license for your GMRS walkie-talkies (you did buy a license didn't you?) you get a W callsign.
The only way to accomplish this would be to rebuild the entire radio communications system from the ground up, and not allow anyone to use anything else. That is so not going to happen -- the problem is akin to tearing down a city and rebuilding it from the subterranean level up. It's not that it isn't possible -- it's just that it would cost so much money and displace so many people that there's no reason on earth why anyone should think it a good idea. (The few cases where such a thing is possible -- postwar Germany, Kabul, Beirut, Nero's Rome, Banda Aceh -- it's been because of war or natural devastation.)
People who make this assertion don't really understand the nature of radio waves. You can't simply switch everyone over to a 5GHz spread spectrum scheme -- the propagation characteristics are very different at 1100 KHz, 25 MHz, 100 MHz, 460 MHz, 900 MHz, and 2.4 GHz (to take a half dozen frequencies in commonly used areas). The regions above about 6 GHz are pretty much useless for anything but short-range communication, satellite communication, and radar, while the CB bands at 27 MHz are superbly unsuitable for their intended purpose because they're potentially capable of worldwide propagation given proper ionosphere conditions.
If you want an idea of what an unregulated radio world, look at a shortwave guide and see what the US offers. How many of them aren't religious broadcasters? How many of them broadcast far-right tripe? Look at the CB bands and see what kind of crap goes on there, in a 40-channel swatch that the FCC gave up on enforcing years ago. Eventually you'd have nothing but a vast swatch of radio anarchy, with jammers, rednecks, and general troublemakers shouting down anyone they don't like.
Or you could just google the callsign KG6IRO or name Jack Gerritsen and find out why that fellow recently went to jail for what he did with his ham radio equipment. Talk all you want about the nobility of your cause and giving the airwaves back to the people, but if there was such a thing as radio anarchy, there'd be a lot more douchebags like Gerritsen out there.
Nope. Crystal sets work by using a diode to rectify an amplitude modulated signal into a baseband soundwave -- it's a little hard to explain, but it basically encodes the frequency shifts in the sound as a change in the "loudness" of the carrier wave.
FM (frequency modulation) encodes the frequency shifts as, well, frequency shifts. It would be virtually impossible to build a crystal set that works for FM, except for certain restricted forms of FSK (frequency shift keying), which is mostly used for teletype transmissions, and even then it would create a device far too complicated to be worth the effort.
If you don't understand any of this, look it up in Wikipedia or a book on radio electronics -- it's not that hard to understand, but it does have to be explained in technical terms.
There was also a certain element of the AM establishment trying to quash FM -- RCA, I believe, but I don't remember for certain. The frequency shift obsoleted a lot of radios, and I think that particular swatch of low VHF was reallocated to television. It set FM back for years, which was having troubles enough because the owners of FM stations insisted on having them simulcast AM programming instead of doing original programming.
I suspect commercial FM radio wouldn't really be viable without stereo as well -- probably the radio world's biggest killer app until WiFi.
That would certainly be consistent with the general denseness of the Jedi council, but not with what happened to Yoda in RotS. By the end of the Clone Wars, with all his communing with Qui-Gon, you would figure that Yoda would have learned to put the daily politics of the Jedi aside.
I agree that it would make sense in a grand scheme for Yoda's motivations to be somewhat questionable. Unfortunately I don't think it's reconcilable with the black/white understanding of the Force. I could make a reasonable case that the Dark Side and the Light Side are really forces of Entropy and Creation, and the effects of the Dark Side -- madness, bodily degradation, etc -- are inherent to the entropic qualities of the Dark Side, which would make a less clear-cut Yoda far more tenable, but it isn't canon and truth be told I don't think George Lucas necessarily gave it much thought. He tweaked a lot of details, but I think the fundamental philosophy of the Force is intact from the earliest drafts of the movie. The little effort he did put into rethinking it, with midichlorians and all trying to give a scientific basis for the Force, actually made a lot of sense but was laughed out of the theatre.
My point is a bit more subtle than that. For the money it takes to shoot four hours of video on this camcorder, you can do much more with off-the-shelf equipment even without bringing a computer into the equation. By the time you've added a computer into the equation (let's say $800 for a refurbed eMac with a DVD burner), you can eliminate the VCR and spend a total of $100 on tape stock. Let's pull a price out of the air -- $5/hour seems about reasonable for that quantity, giving us 20 hours of video. Now we're spending $1300 on our system. You need to buy sixty CVS disposables to get that, which puts us in the vicinity of $2700 for "tape stock" alone.
To get the equivalent functionality of the first package, for what it's worth, I'd say add about $250-$300 at current prices for a DVD player and a DVD burner. And you still have to deal with those 20-minute DVDs. (A mastering deck is a mastering deck. In this case you also have an intermediate source deck, which is a pain in the ass at best.)
Right. If it was HD, *maybe*. But that market is still years away, and the people who would be most likely to benefit from cheap HD are people who are doing things like community access that might never switch to HD in the first place.
Eh, HD is a little more expensive than that, but let's break it down a bit differently:
$400 for a low-end MiniDV cam $30 for a fourpack of DV tapes, 60 minutes each for four hours $60 for a VHS VCR to use as a mastering deck $10 for a 9-pack of VHS tapes, 2 hours each for a total of 18 hours, which is 14 hours too much for our consideration
Now keep in mind that MiniDV is as good as consumer-grade SDTV is ever going to get, good enough for professional use on the right gear. That brings your startup costs for the bare minimum of linear editing capability to $500.
Compare that to $45 a whack for 20 minutes. For that same $500 you get 11 20-minute DVDs (on a format that can hold FOUR HOURS of content), adding up to a total of 3 hours, 40 minutes, with enough left over for two tins of Altoids. Not only does that come up short of the four hours you get with our bare-minimum $500 setup above, you have essentially zero editing capability, a huge pile of DVDs, and presumably the same quality as you'd get on VHS. Not to mention the fact that even the most bare-bones DV camcorder has dozens of features that a disposable camcorder can only dream of, and the cost is amortized -- to shoot another 4 hours of video, you only need another $30 4-pack of DV tapes (you've already got seven VHS tapes left over).
HD is an unfair comparison -- the only HD cam that cheap is a Sony that isn't even shipping yet, and it'll be a long while before disposables are doing HD anyway.
If you're an attractive woman and you have been photographed in flagrante delicto using a film camera, there is a very good chance you are being masturbated to by some fifteen year old who has an unauthorized copy of your boobies taped to his wall.
Well... Microsoft is always looking towards lockin. I don't think they'll ever quite be able to pull it off, but that isn't going to stop them from trying.
As for the Mac... well, there is always the Carbon vs. Cocoa problem. I don't think Apple is a huge fan of Carbon development -- they want people using ObjC and Cocoa. They wouldn't have even bothered with Carbon except that nobody would have ported to OS X without it.
I'd say the real issue is that Microsoft has a problem with eating its own dogfood. If they had to build on.NET 2.0, you'd better believe they'd have it done by now, especially if that was their development platform.
Don't forget, Solaris utterly sucked until Sun forced its developers off of SunOS -- it didn't get better until the developers actually had to work with it.
I predict that this will happen if and only if IBM comes up with a) an open reference platform based on the PowerPC (an updating of CHRP would be fine, just get it into stores on commodity motherboards) and b) puts their imprimatur on a version of Linux that won't give the average joe user headaches to get up and running.
It's not hard to do the latter. The former would be rather difficult though.
The really fun part about Consumers Union is how people out to smear them call them communists. You would think we as a country had long since outgrown Red-baiting, but you'd be wrong.
I don't think our points are mutually exclusive -- BPL in a higher spectrum might work (though you still have the technical issues of trying to get a signal around a transformer). My point is that if the most practical solution to the problem is as radical as redesigning the power grid from the ground up, maybe you're trying to solve the wrong problem.
It's like teleportation -- just because there's nothing in the physics textbooks that says it's against the rules doesn't mean it's actually worth trying to do. Yes, it's been done, but in a way that indicates it's useless for anything above the quantum level.
Actually, I'm a ham myself, so I'm very aware of that. All I'm saying is that hams tend to get a bit puffed up when they don't deserve it -- if they want the glory of being a first responder, then they should get EMT training, and then they'd have a legitimate reason to be on the frontlines.
Ham emergency work is back-of-the-line drudge work with very little glory attached, but it's important drudge work that needs to be done. ARES/RACES, Skywarn, and the CB equivalent REACT are great services (I'm surprised there's no equivalent for FRS), but ultimately a lot of hams get off on the idea of being "emergency personnel" and wind up being pests rather than help.
Look at it this way -- it's the difference between the pyromaniac who becomes a firefighter for the attention and the search and recovery crews at 9/11 -- the firebug is a gloryhound who might actually wind up setting a fire just to put one out, but the personnel at the WTC were risking their health and sanity not just because it was their jobs but because they felt an obligation to help -- basic human decency. No real glory in that, ultimately.
The technical problem to be overcome involves a total overhaul of every meter of power line in the country, restringing them with lines capable of preventing signal leakage. Something on the order of millions of kilometers of wide-gauge UTP of a type that hasn't even been invented yet. I don't think that's going to work. At that point you're better off stringing fiber and using WiMax for the last mile.
Well... I would say any public safety agency that is using HF for communications had better have a damn good reason (I'm thinking forest rangers here, not local police). That said, HF is still used for long-haul communications in numerous applications -- marine, wilderness, etc. -- and you can't always rely on having a satellite available.
Actually, given the way business is about ramming bad technology through regulatory barriers without regard for whether it actually works or not, I think you've got the last two steps backwards. BPL is just another subsidy for the well-connected -- it doesn't work, it has no future, but the utilities can make a metric assload off of government grants before reality catches up with them. It's like National Missile Defense -- it takes about forty seconds of rational thought to realize that such a thing is impossible, but the government keeps funding it anyway.
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I have three of them -- two PS/2 (different models) and one USB that the RatShack guy swore he wasn't supposed to give me unless I bought a computer. I agree -- they're pretty useless. It's mildly interesting technically, but really...
The funny thing about hacking the little beasts was that while it was possible to more or less duplicate the official CRQ bar codes, there was little point. It was a bad design and there was nothing the "standard" (i.e. anything but) barcodes could do that couldn't be duplicated with a Code 39 font, even a demo version with only numbers. (The funny thing was that the CueCat was capable of handling a rather large number of different code schemes, but Digital Convergence didn't publicize that.)
The CueCat has a bright red LED, not a laser, more or less the same as the bottom of a current-gen optical mouse.
I've wondered the same thing, though "callsign" has a somewhat different meaning in aviation than in radio.
Yeah, the US has a rather large chunk of namespace. A and N seem to be mostly used by military and amateur stations -- almost everything else is W and K. Usually if you buy a license for your GMRS walkie-talkies (you did buy a license didn't you?) you get a W callsign.
The only way to accomplish this would be to rebuild the entire radio communications system from the ground up, and not allow anyone to use anything else. That is so not going to happen -- the problem is akin to tearing down a city and rebuilding it from the subterranean level up. It's not that it isn't possible -- it's just that it would cost so much money and displace so many people that there's no reason on earth why anyone should think it a good idea. (The few cases where such a thing is possible -- postwar Germany, Kabul, Beirut, Nero's Rome, Banda Aceh -- it's been because of war or natural devastation.)
People who make this assertion don't really understand the nature of radio waves. You can't simply switch everyone over to a 5GHz spread spectrum scheme -- the propagation characteristics are very different at 1100 KHz, 25 MHz, 100 MHz, 460 MHz, 900 MHz, and 2.4 GHz (to take a half dozen frequencies in commonly used areas). The regions above about 6 GHz are pretty much useless for anything but short-range communication, satellite communication, and radar, while the CB bands at 27 MHz are superbly unsuitable for their intended purpose because they're potentially capable of worldwide propagation given proper ionosphere conditions.
If you want an idea of what an unregulated radio world, look at a shortwave guide and see what the US offers. How many of them aren't religious broadcasters? How many of them broadcast far-right tripe? Look at the CB bands and see what kind of crap goes on there, in a 40-channel swatch that the FCC gave up on enforcing years ago. Eventually you'd have nothing but a vast swatch of radio anarchy, with jammers, rednecks, and general troublemakers shouting down anyone they don't like.
Or you could just google the callsign KG6IRO or name Jack Gerritsen and find out why that fellow recently went to jail for what he did with his ham radio equipment. Talk all you want about the nobility of your cause and giving the airwaves back to the people, but if there was such a thing as radio anarchy, there'd be a lot more douchebags like Gerritsen out there.
Nope. Crystal sets work by using a diode to rectify an amplitude modulated signal into a baseband soundwave -- it's a little hard to explain, but it basically encodes the frequency shifts in the sound as a change in the "loudness" of the carrier wave.
FM (frequency modulation) encodes the frequency shifts as, well, frequency shifts. It would be virtually impossible to build a crystal set that works for FM, except for certain restricted forms of FSK (frequency shift keying), which is mostly used for teletype transmissions, and even then it would create a device far too complicated to be worth the effort.
If you don't understand any of this, look it up in Wikipedia or a book on radio electronics -- it's not that hard to understand, but it does have to be explained in technical terms.
There was also a certain element of the AM establishment trying to quash FM -- RCA, I believe, but I don't remember for certain. The frequency shift obsoleted a lot of radios, and I think that particular swatch of low VHF was reallocated to television. It set FM back for years, which was having troubles enough because the owners of FM stations insisted on having them simulcast AM programming instead of doing original programming.
I suspect commercial FM radio wouldn't really be viable without stereo as well -- probably the radio world's biggest killer app until WiFi.
Phase modulation for example -- needed for most digital radio.
That would certainly be consistent with the general denseness of the Jedi council, but not with what happened to Yoda in RotS. By the end of the Clone Wars, with all his communing with Qui-Gon, you would figure that Yoda would have learned to put the daily politics of the Jedi aside.
I agree that it would make sense in a grand scheme for Yoda's motivations to be somewhat questionable. Unfortunately I don't think it's reconcilable with the black/white understanding of the Force. I could make a reasonable case that the Dark Side and the Light Side are really forces of Entropy and Creation, and the effects of the Dark Side -- madness, bodily degradation, etc -- are inherent to the entropic qualities of the Dark Side, which would make a less clear-cut Yoda far more tenable, but it isn't canon and truth be told I don't think George Lucas necessarily gave it much thought. He tweaked a lot of details, but I think the fundamental philosophy of the Force is intact from the earliest drafts of the movie. The little effort he did put into rethinking it, with midichlorians and all trying to give a scientific basis for the Force, actually made a lot of sense but was laughed out of the theatre.
Oh, and I forgot to say:
My point is a bit more subtle than that. For the money it takes to shoot four hours of video on this camcorder, you can do much more with off-the-shelf equipment even without bringing a computer into the equation. By the time you've added a computer into the equation (let's say $800 for a refurbed eMac with a DVD burner), you can eliminate the VCR and spend a total of $100 on tape stock. Let's pull a price out of the air -- $5/hour seems about reasonable for that quantity, giving us 20 hours of video. Now we're spending $1300 on our system. You need to buy sixty CVS disposables to get that, which puts us in the vicinity of $2700 for "tape stock" alone.
To get the equivalent functionality of the first package, for what it's worth, I'd say add about $250-$300 at current prices for a DVD player and a DVD burner. And you still have to deal with those 20-minute DVDs. (A mastering deck is a mastering deck. In this case you also have an intermediate source deck, which is a pain in the ass at best.)
Right. If it was HD, *maybe*. But that market is still years away, and the people who would be most likely to benefit from cheap HD are people who are doing things like community access that might never switch to HD in the first place.
Eh, HD is a little more expensive than that, but let's break it down a bit differently:
$400 for a low-end MiniDV cam
$30 for a fourpack of DV tapes, 60 minutes each for four hours
$60 for a VHS VCR to use as a mastering deck
$10 for a 9-pack of VHS tapes, 2 hours each for a total of 18 hours, which is 14 hours too much for our consideration
Now keep in mind that MiniDV is as good as consumer-grade SDTV is ever going to get, good enough for professional use on the right gear. That brings your startup costs for the bare minimum of linear editing capability to $500.
Compare that to $45 a whack for 20 minutes. For that same $500 you get 11 20-minute DVDs (on a format that can hold FOUR HOURS of content), adding up to a total of 3 hours, 40 minutes, with enough left over for two tins of Altoids. Not only does that come up short of the four hours you get with our bare-minimum $500 setup above, you have essentially zero editing capability, a huge pile of DVDs, and presumably the same quality as you'd get on VHS. Not to mention the fact that even the most bare-bones DV camcorder has dozens of features that a disposable camcorder can only dream of, and the cost is amortized -- to shoot another 4 hours of video, you only need another $30 4-pack of DV tapes (you've already got seven VHS tapes left over).
HD is an unfair comparison -- the only HD cam that cheap is a Sony that isn't even shipping yet, and it'll be a long while before disposables are doing HD anyway.
Put bluntly:
If you're an attractive woman and you have been photographed in flagrante delicto using a film camera, there is a very good chance you are being masturbated to by some fifteen year old who has an unauthorized copy of your boobies taped to his wall.
Uh... Shoutcast. Look into it.
Anyway, Sirius already has an eclectic channel. Might not be exactly what you want, but Disorder is pretty mixed up.
Well... Microsoft is always looking towards lockin. I don't think they'll ever quite be able to pull it off, but that isn't going to stop them from trying.
As for the Mac... well, there is always the Carbon vs. Cocoa problem. I don't think Apple is a huge fan of Carbon development -- they want people using ObjC and Cocoa. They wouldn't have even bothered with Carbon except that nobody would have ported to OS X without it.
I'd say the real issue is that Microsoft has a problem with eating its own dogfood. If they had to build on .NET 2.0, you'd better believe they'd have it done by now, especially if that was their development platform.
Don't forget, Solaris utterly sucked until Sun forced its developers off of SunOS -- it didn't get better until the developers actually had to work with it.
I predict that this will happen if and only if IBM comes up with a) an open reference platform based on the PowerPC (an updating of CHRP would be fine, just get it into stores on commodity motherboards) and b) puts their imprimatur on a version of Linux that won't give the average joe user headaches to get up and running.
It's not hard to do the latter. The former would be rather difficult though.
The really fun part about Consumers Union is how people out to smear them call them communists. You would think we as a country had long since outgrown Red-baiting, but you'd be wrong.
It could be the 21st century equivalent of Rural Electrification -- that's the Federal New Deal program that worked that nobody ever talks about.
I don't think our points are mutually exclusive -- BPL in a higher spectrum might work (though you still have the technical issues of trying to get a signal around a transformer). My point is that if the most practical solution to the problem is as radical as redesigning the power grid from the ground up, maybe you're trying to solve the wrong problem.
It's like teleportation -- just because there's nothing in the physics textbooks that says it's against the rules doesn't mean it's actually worth trying to do. Yes, it's been done, but in a way that indicates it's useless for anything above the quantum level.
Actually, I'm a ham myself, so I'm very aware of that. All I'm saying is that hams tend to get a bit puffed up when they don't deserve it -- if they want the glory of being a first responder, then they should get EMT training, and then they'd have a legitimate reason to be on the frontlines.
Ham emergency work is back-of-the-line drudge work with very little glory attached, but it's important drudge work that needs to be done. ARES/RACES, Skywarn, and the CB equivalent REACT are great services (I'm surprised there's no equivalent for FRS), but ultimately a lot of hams get off on the idea of being "emergency personnel" and wind up being pests rather than help.
Look at it this way -- it's the difference between the pyromaniac who becomes a firefighter for the attention and the search and recovery crews at 9/11 -- the firebug is a gloryhound who might actually wind up setting a fire just to put one out, but the personnel at the WTC were risking their health and sanity not just because it was their jobs but because they felt an obligation to help -- basic human decency. No real glory in that, ultimately.
Ah, fair enough.
Dvorak is a pundit with no particular credibility. He was always bearish on Apple, and the Mac just refused to die.
The technical problem to be overcome involves a total overhaul of every meter of power line in the country, restringing them with lines capable of preventing signal leakage. Something on the order of millions of kilometers of wide-gauge UTP of a type that hasn't even been invented yet. I don't think that's going to work. At that point you're better off stringing fiber and using WiMax for the last mile.
Well... I would say any public safety agency that is using HF for communications had better have a damn good reason (I'm thinking forest rangers here, not local police). That said, HF is still used for long-haul communications in numerous applications -- marine, wilderness, etc. -- and you can't always rely on having a satellite available.
Actually, given the way business is about ramming bad technology through regulatory barriers without regard for whether it actually works or not, I think you've got the last two steps backwards. BPL is just another subsidy for the well-connected -- it doesn't work, it has no future, but the utilities can make a metric assload off of government grants before reality catches up with them. It's like National Missile Defense -- it takes about forty seconds of rational thought to realize that such a thing is impossible, but the government keeps funding it anyway.