Really? I don't understand how anyone would think OFDM wouldn't work on indoor channels, as they're always more benign than outdoor channels. That shouldn't even matter too much anyway because tolerance of multipath was always recognized as one of OFDM's strengths (compared to single carrier modulation which requires more complex equalization). My understanding was that their main contribution was an OFDM implementation on chip - impressive and definitely necessary for commercialization, but that should hardly give you the right to take out a broad patent on wireless networking.
CSIRO themselves might be accused of being the initial WIFI patent trolls. Both wireless networking and OFDM were around long before 1992, and they also waited until WIFI gear was widespread before litigating.
Indeed they do. In the past I used to watch MLG gaming broadcasts that were streamed with Octoshape, a proprietary P2P service. After having a lot of problems over the months, I started to think the problem was on my end and contacted Rogers. The response from their tech support was an unapologetic "we throttle all P2P". I tried several times to explain that the broadcast was completely above board, no piracy, etc., but he didn't care in the least and wouldn't even discuss the possibility of a fix. This was around the time when Rogers had been caught throttling WoW updates that used P2P and had promised to fix the problem..... within 4 MONTHS!?!?
Not only that, but it looks like what they're really doing is comparing 4-fold diversity at the receiver to a single conventional receive antenna. That's not a balanced comparison from the communications standpoint. Obviously it could make multiple receive antennas at low RF frequencies more practical though.
It's hard to see how supporting both control schemes could ever be made to work well in terms of equalizing aiming difficulty, which is kind of a requirement for multiplayer.
PC gamers bitch and moan about nooby aim assist in console FPS. Well, it's necessary. Not only because of the limited range of motion of the controller sticks, but because the sticks directly control rotational speed rather than position (as with a mouse). That makes them extremely sensitive by default, so to compensate we end up with more reticle magnetism (on the target), more smoothing (off the target) and bigger hitboxes in console FPS. There's no getting around that, and there's only so much you can leave in the hands of the player - sensitivity and smoothing should be adjustable whereas modification of reticle magnetism or hitbox size would be a no go for obvious reasons.
To make both schemes viable the developer could attempt to reduce the assistance by a fixed amount if you're using a mouse + keyboard, but that would likely be hard to balance and you'd have endless complaining about how the controller noobs are getting an unfair advantage. This looks like a problem with no good solution.
No. An information bearing signal may be either baseband or bandpass depending on whether it is transmitted directly or used to modulate a high frequency carrier. It may also be either narrowband or wideband, which, in the proper technical sense, is defined with respect to the channel. If the signal bandwidth is wide enough to cause distortion in the form intersymbol interference then the signal is deemed wideband (typically, an equalizer is needed to deal with this).
The term broadband is very much technology independent and carries with it an implication of high data rate. That's still quite vague because there's no reference to a standard non-broadband speed, but then again it's not a very technical term to begin with.
You're trolling, right? The heart of the issue has already been explained even if you still fail to accept it - the increase in dropped calls was explained by Jobs in a way that would be favourably misinterpreted as a tiny difference. In reality, the available information (from, GASP, the INTERNET) would suggest it has nearly doubled.
I wonder, whose motivation do you think is stronger to distort the truth in this situation - random slashdot posters who couldn't really give a toss about Apple, or a CEO in the process of damage control because his company's reputation is taking a beating? That's irrelevant since his claims have already been exposed as misleading. If he wasn't allowed to provide any meaningful stats on the issue, why do you suppose he went down that road anyway?
Why on earth is this guy getting modded up for posts like this? Yea, the internet actually can be a trusty source when the alternative is the ramblings of someone who has every interest in deliberately misleading consumers into believing there's nothing wrong with his product.
That's about the only option if he aims to have it read by other experts in the field. If government employees received an exemption from the paywall, it would be decried as favoritism. However, the gov typically retains the copyright instead of passing it on to the journal, so it's probably legal for him to post it on the web.
Drop in wanted signal strength is not the same as interference. Interference is not so much of an issue with GSM because the channels are frequency and time multiplexed. Users don't share the same slice of spectrum at the same time as in CDMA.
Also, a signal loss of 27 dB (dB is relative, dBm is absolute, so loss is specified in dB) will result in a hell of lot more coverage reduction than 50%. Assume a path loss exponent of 4 for urban propagation (versus 2 for free space). That's a gross approximation, but one that's not usually too far off. In this case, 12 dB signal loss will halve the distance at which you can communicate with the base station. 24 dB loss would reduce your range by a factor of 4, thereby reducing your coverage area by a factor of 16. Then again, this 27 dB loss is very likely a worst case scenario, so it isn't really representative of the problems most people are seeing.
And could people stop talking about how the antenna is being short-circuited. Skin does not have zero impedance, even at these frequencies. The loss is due to a detuning of the antenna because its electromagnetic properties are being significantly modified, not completely shorted.
Inter-tube resonance effect of several million US soccer fans simultaneously typing "USA USA USA..." into fifa fan chat. Thank you, Landon Donovan, for the afternoon off.
I would agree if the scenario you speak off was relevant. Respectable developers just don't release games with crippling input lag, which is why I can't see them using the motion driven controller for an FPS until they get the lag down. I'm not so sure 100ms is crippling for most FPS (you can probably play a tactical shooter or medium-paced shooter such as Halo), but it probably would be for twitch shooters like Quake.
My objection was to your phrasing - you made it sound like input lag was the primary factor in how well a modern FPS plays. In reality, input lag is almost always kept low enough to prevent the game feeling like crap (by design), and network lag is the main source of frustration.
That's not lag compensation, it's simply doing some of the game actions immediately on the client side without any host side validation. Without it, basic actions like moving, firing, jumping, etc would all have to be lead, and the amount of lead would vary from game to game depending on your latency to the host (extremely frustrating).
However, these things are only happening immediately on your screen, not the host's console. So although you might see your bullets connecting with the target's face, it never actually happened unless the host agrees. The claim that "input lag is by far worse than network lag" is absurd unless you're talking about a game with client side hit detection (e.g. Shadowrun), but most console games use host side detection (Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc).
Surely the fault couldn't be something as simple as the speed or acceleration sensor becoming saturated? This could throw off even a properly designed, stable feedback loop because the basic analysis doesn't consider nonlinearities. I'm assuming that it is in fact a proper digital feedback system done in hardware (in which case the only software involved is a digital filter responding to periodic interrupt requests), not some wishy-washy software routine that can't be analyzed for stability.
If you're discussing bugs, antennae is correct. If you're talking radio, however, it's "antennas".
Also, recall that the power density drops by the square of the distance from the antenna. So, if you measure the power at one micron away from the antenna, it will be twice the strength you'd get if you measure it two microns away. Extend this out, and at 3 microns, you're down to 1/8th the power, 4 microns = 1/16th. At 20 feet, you should be all the way down to 1 / 3,716,121,600,000th the original power, or about one three-trillionth the original power. Right? So nothing to worry about.
This is incorrect.
At cellular frequencies just microns away from the antenna, you're still in the near field. You need to be at least several wavelengths (1 wavelength ~= 15 centimeters at 2GHz) distance from the source before you start seeing the predictable, far-field inverse square law decay of power.
More importantly, in path loss calculations the distance is effectively normalized to the wavelength [decay ~ (distance/wavelength)^2] rather than some arbitary scale such as a micron.
Rough calculation neglecting any shielding offered by the building:
20 ft ~= 40 wavelengths at 2GHz
Power loss ~= 16*pi^2*40^2 = 2.53E5 = 54 dB
So, neglecting antenna gains and any shielding offered by the building itself, even if the tower was pumping out 1kW (60 dBm), you'd still only see 60 dBm - 54 dB = 6 dBm = 4 milliwatts. This is considerably less than what you're exposed to by putting your cell phone with transmit power ~= 100 milliWatts right next to your head (near field situation). The results are still favourable even if we're talking about 900 MHz cellular instead of 2 GHz.
Just to add to Kendall's post, you might look into PeerGuardian if you're not already using a similar tool. It maintains a large black list of known anti-P2P organization and government IP addresses, and communication is blocked whenever they pose as peers. Not a single download ever passes without numerous access attempts.
If you are already using protection, it must be that either the program failed (blacklist incomplete or out of date) or Verizon is inspecting packets on their own accord. I'd be curious to hear which.
There's a logical solution which would address the problem of what is basically a binary system of payment (full price vs nothing at all) - pay for the amount you play. Aside from the obvious practical issue of getting players to agree to have their play time monitored and recorded, which would be viewed as invasive, it really does make sense in terms of compensating the developer in an amount commensurate with the value derived by the consumer. The scale could be something like: free for the first X hours then Y cents per minute up to a cap of Z dollars, at which point you own the game free and clear and could play as much as you want online or offline. It would be just like a free trial of the full game followed by an extended rental period with a continuous pay-to-play scale over time, and the rental payments are always applied to the purchase price.
Charges wouldn't necessarily have to be applied over time - it could be per level or map in single player or per match in multiplayer - anything that wouldn't leave you feeling ripped off after you discover the game is not to your liking or you just don't have time to play it. Online music stores have already taken advantage of breaking the purchase up into smaller, more digestable chunks by allowing us to buy songs individually instead of only as a full album. The consumer is happy because they actually get what they pay for, and they may be less discriminating about trying new games that look iffy.
Uh, no. Range is not a function of signal power. It more is a function of the overall signal/noise ratio and the sensitivity of the receiver. This includes noise introduced in the transmitter, natural/other noise, and noise introduced in the receiver. An antenna system with gain can both concentrate and attenuate signals, depending on the directivity and where its pointed.
BTW, I got over 1400 miles out of a little 0.3 watt ham signal, but thats no where near as impressive as Earth still being able to receive signals from Voyager 1 and 2 nearly 10 billion miles away. That's impressive.
-Michael
This post is horribly misleading. If range wasn't a function of signal power, why on earth don't we have handsets which operate with microwatt transmit power instead of (typically) something on the order of a tenth of a watt?
Range is certainly a function of transmit power. If you have line of sight between the transmitter and receiver, every factor of 4 increase in transmit power (6 dB) doubles your range. It should be pointed out that often times we don't have line of sight for cellular, even when the base station is sitting on a high rooftop, so the range vs power gains will be less than ideal.
Any increases in range achieved by raising transmit power are above and beyond (independent of) those you get from using directional antennas. I'll spare you the insult of linking a free space path loss article. Obviously, not every wireless communications system is a fixed installation which can take advantage of directional antennas - cell phones need the capability of receiving from any direction, for example - so, in many cases of practical interest, there isn't an option to increase range via antenna directionality.
Lastly, noise introduced at the transmitter is meaningless because it is of much smaller power than the signal and suffers the same channel attenuation before reaching the receiver. Actually, it wouldn't even be properly considered noise in that case - it would an undesired emission, possibly violating whatever EMI / RFI spectral mask regulations govern communication in the band of interest. There's a reason why link budget calculations are always based on noise / inteference at the receiver.
I think you're contradicting your earlier post that 700 MHz would be "far more suitable for cell service than the current ranges", icebike. Penetration and propagation losses, as well as more detailed channel characteristics such as fading rate, fade depth, and delay spread, will be very similar at 700 MHz and 850 MHz simply because, as you pointed out above, the relative change in wavelength is small.
There may be something to talk about when comparing 700 MHz to 2 GHz because that's a factor of 3 difference. Despite the improvement in propagation loss, lowering carrier frequency may carry some technology dependent disadvantages as well - e.g. increase in fade duration makes interleaving less effective, less multipath (good for GSM since it's narrowband, bad for CDMA since the RAKE receiver will give you less performance benefit). I'm tempted to say the PCB footprint size would increase marginally, leading to a slightly larger handset, but I'm not 100% confident on that.
Yup. Not only that, but they've been making bank on shoddy wired controllers for a couple years now. It's fairly well known (by people who would actually notice) that the official Microsoft wired controller has an alarmingly high defect rate, the main problem being "slow turn" with the analog sticks. Basically, even if the stick is pushed all the way over in a certain direction, the reticle transitions very slowly on screen, thus rendering the controller severely impaired for FPS play. I'm talking out-of-the-box failures in many cases, not just typical wear and tear over time. The problem has been noticed most widely in Halo 3 (possibly exacerbated by the "aim acceleration" Bungie uses in its aiming system), but it's also been documented for other shooters.
The problem has been known about for years, but, unlike with the 360 mainboard revisions, MS has done nothing to address it. They continue to sell the identical piece of defective hardware, and I've heard of people spending several hundred dollars on controllers alone because wired is the only option for LAN play at most tournaments. Companies like MyCustomXbox have parlayed this into a business opportunity for themselves by selling "no-slow" wired controllers with an apparent hardware fix.
Their strategy for making up the loses due to selling the console below cost + the RRoD fiasco is becoming apparent - sell crappy, mandatory peripherals at inflated prices.
Don't think so. Regardless of whether the FFT had been invented before the 1960s, it's an understatement to say it has been in widespread within the science, math and engineering communities since then. It really wouldn't have even been considered new technology in the 1970s. Not sure if any of its more recent flavours (such as FFTW) have ever been patented - after all, they're all just efficient implementations of the DFT, which has been around much longer.
The communications technology used by Wifi, which makes heavy use of the FFT, is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Of course, OFDM / multicarrier modulation had also been around long before CSIRO ever filed their patent, so you'd have to off your rocker to claim any novelty there either. And yes, I'm quite confident it was deployed in real world communication systems before 1996.
So what's left? You say CSIRO's FFT chip was the key to the patent. Are you sure there weren't any FFT ASICs floating around before 1996? I'd be extremely surprised if that were the case. In fact, I'd be (slightly less) amazed if OFDM specific ASICs weren't around before 1996.
After skimming the patent document, it seems their main claim to fame is high data rate wireless networking. They freely admit that wireless LANs achieving up to 3-6 Mbps were already available from Motorola. So, basically, they provided a higher data rate solution using OFDM, which was already well-known to be a viable solution for frequency selective channels (which typically arise when using large bandwidths). We could probably have a fruitless, drawn-out argument about whether there is really any novelty here or just a small extension of existing technologies.
That is just mostly people who have "hacked" in a keyboard/mouse combo. When you combine autoaim with a keyboard/mouse you're able to easily beat people who are using the controller. This is particularly true because there are two extreme long distance "one shot kill" weapons as well as a MUCH higher damage value for head shots with ALL weapons. So if you have your little mouse/KB combo you can direct all your fire right at the opposing player's head and they are owned before they even knew you were shooting at them.
There isn't much to be done about it. They can turn off autoaim and that would make the mouse/KB combo more awkward. But it would also make controller aiming extremely frustrating. If you want proof of that just try to betray a teammate with a pistol while using the controller. It is virtually impossible because autoaim is turned off when you're aiming at teammates.
I think these claims are speculative and misleading. Have you any evidence that "hacking in" a keyboard/mouse combo in place of a controller is commonplace on XBL? It might be feasible from a technology standpoint, but I've never heard it discussed in regards to Halo 3. I do know that a large portion of the best Halo players don't use any such cheats because they actually attend tournaments in person and win on LAN as well. Believe it or not, there are kids out there, many of them 12 or 13, who are capable of dominating you in Halo without cheating. If you're deluded enought to deny it, go to MLG's site (mlgpro.com) and watch some of the gameplay vids.
I'm wondering whether or not it became apparent that you basically volunteered yourself as the butt of the parent's joke.
Your grasp on Halo mechanics is a little flimsy. First, most weapons in the game aren't even headshot capable, meaning there is no extra damage conveyed by shooting at the opponent's head. Second, even for the medium-long range headshot capable weapons like the Battle Rifle and Carbine, headshots only matter once the opponent's shield is depleted. It's not simply a matter of much higher damage on every shot - once the shield is down (several shots), a single headshot kills instantly as opposed to a few body shots. Actually though, it's not very difficult to land head shots with these weapons anyway because the headshot hitboxes are huge. The sniper rifle kills with a single headshot or two body shots and is much harder to aim in general (low magnetism, small hitbox), so yes, there would be an advantage there.
It's a common error, but what you're really talking about is "aim magnetism" (aka "sticky aim"), not "auto-aim" (aka "aim-assist"). Magnetism causes your reticle to slow down when passed over the opponent (friction) and even be actively dragged when the opponent moves (adhesion). Auto-aim is what causes your shots to land even when your reticle is slightly off-target.
Not much else to say really - it's an FPS, they're supposed to require aiming skill by definition - so of course an aiming cheat would give you an advantage. I don't believe a keyboard + mouse combo would allow a bad / mediocre player to dominate though. There are just too many other elements to the game (grenades, knowledge of spawns, teamwork, decision making, predition, reaction time) besides raw aiming skill.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I don't understand how anyone would think OFDM wouldn't work on indoor channels, as they're always more benign than outdoor channels. That shouldn't even matter too much anyway because tolerance of multipath was always recognized as one of OFDM's strengths (compared to single carrier modulation which requires more complex equalization). My understanding was that their main contribution was an OFDM implementation on chip - impressive and definitely necessary for commercialization, but that should hardly give you the right to take out a broad patent on wireless networking.
CSIRO themselves might be accused of being the initial WIFI patent trolls. Both wireless networking and OFDM were around long before 1992, and they also waited until WIFI gear was widespread before litigating.
Yup, Shannon be damned. Frequency agility, which has been used in various radios for decades, will solve all these pesky spectrum crowding problems.
Indeed they do. In the past I used to watch MLG gaming broadcasts that were streamed with Octoshape, a proprietary P2P service. After having a lot of problems over the months, I started to think the problem was on my end and contacted Rogers. The response from their tech support was an unapologetic "we throttle all P2P". I tried several times to explain that the broadcast was completely above board, no piracy, etc., but he didn't care in the least and wouldn't even discuss the possibility of a fix. This was around the time when Rogers had been caught throttling WoW updates that used P2P and had promised to fix the problem ..... within 4 MONTHS!?!?
Not only that, but it looks like what they're really doing is comparing 4-fold diversity at the receiver to a single conventional receive antenna. That's not a balanced comparison from the communications standpoint. Obviously it could make multiple receive antennas at low RF frequencies more practical though.
It's hard to see how supporting both control schemes could ever be made to work well in terms of equalizing aiming difficulty, which is kind of a requirement for multiplayer.
PC gamers bitch and moan about nooby aim assist in console FPS. Well, it's necessary. Not only because of the limited range of motion of the controller sticks, but because the sticks directly control rotational speed rather than position (as with a mouse). That makes them extremely sensitive by default, so to compensate we end up with more reticle magnetism (on the target), more smoothing (off the target) and bigger hitboxes in console FPS. There's no getting around that, and there's only so much you can leave in the hands of the player - sensitivity and smoothing should be adjustable whereas modification of reticle magnetism or hitbox size would be a no go for obvious reasons.
To make both schemes viable the developer could attempt to reduce the assistance by a fixed amount if you're using a mouse + keyboard, but that would likely be hard to balance and you'd have endless complaining about how the controller noobs are getting an unfair advantage. This looks like a problem with no good solution.
No. An information bearing signal may be either baseband or bandpass depending on whether it is transmitted directly or used to modulate a high frequency carrier. It may also be either narrowband or wideband, which, in the proper technical sense, is defined with respect to the channel. If the signal bandwidth is wide enough to cause distortion in the form intersymbol interference then the signal is deemed wideband (typically, an equalizer is needed to deal with this).
The term broadband is very much technology independent and carries with it an implication of high data rate. That's still quite vague because there's no reference to a standard non-broadband speed, but then again it's not a very technical term to begin with.
If I had mod points, I still wouldn't have enough to service this post.
You're trolling, right? The heart of the issue has already been explained even if you still fail to accept it - the increase in dropped calls was explained by Jobs in a way that would be favourably misinterpreted as a tiny difference. In reality, the available information (from, GASP, the INTERNET) would suggest it has nearly doubled.
I wonder, whose motivation do you think is stronger to distort the truth in this situation - random slashdot posters who couldn't really give a toss about Apple, or a CEO in the process of damage control because his company's reputation is taking a beating? That's irrelevant since his claims have already been exposed as misleading. If he wasn't allowed to provide any meaningful stats on the issue, why do you suppose he went down that road anyway?
Why on earth is this guy getting modded up for posts like this? Yea, the internet actually can be a trusty source when the alternative is the ramblings of someone who has every interest in deliberately misleading consumers into believing there's nothing wrong with his product.
That's about the only option if he aims to have it read by other experts in the field. If government employees received an exemption from the paywall, it would be decried as favoritism. However, the gov typically retains the copyright instead of passing it on to the journal, so it's probably legal for him to post it on the web.
Drop in wanted signal strength is not the same as interference. Interference is not so much of an issue with GSM because the channels are frequency and time multiplexed. Users don't share the same slice of spectrum at the same time as in CDMA.
Also, a signal loss of 27 dB (dB is relative, dBm is absolute, so loss is specified in dB) will result in a hell of lot more coverage reduction than 50%. Assume a path loss exponent of 4 for urban propagation (versus 2 for free space). That's a gross approximation, but one that's not usually too far off. In this case, 12 dB signal loss will halve the distance at which you can communicate with the base station. 24 dB loss would reduce your range by a factor of 4, thereby reducing your coverage area by a factor of 16. Then again, this 27 dB loss is very likely a worst case scenario, so it isn't really representative of the problems most people are seeing.
And could people stop talking about how the antenna is being short-circuited. Skin does not have zero impedance, even at these frequencies. The loss is due to a detuning of the antenna because its electromagnetic properties are being significantly modified, not completely shorted.
Inter-tube resonance effect of several million US soccer fans simultaneously typing "USA USA USA ..." into fifa fan chat. Thank you, Landon Donovan, for the afternoon off.
I would agree if the scenario you speak off was relevant. Respectable developers just don't release games with crippling input lag, which is why I can't see them using the motion driven controller for an FPS until they get the lag down. I'm not so sure 100ms is crippling for most FPS (you can probably play a tactical shooter or medium-paced shooter such as Halo), but it probably would be for twitch shooters like Quake.
My objection was to your phrasing - you made it sound like input lag was the primary factor in how well a modern FPS plays. In reality, input lag is almost always kept low enough to prevent the game feeling like crap (by design), and network lag is the main source of frustration.
That's not lag compensation, it's simply doing some of the game actions immediately on the client side without any host side validation. Without it, basic actions like moving, firing, jumping, etc would all have to be lead, and the amount of lead would vary from game to game depending on your latency to the host (extremely frustrating).
However, these things are only happening immediately on your screen, not the host's console. So although you might see your bullets connecting with the target's face, it never actually happened unless the host agrees. The claim that "input lag is by far worse than network lag" is absurd unless you're talking about a game with client side hit detection (e.g. Shadowrun), but most console games use host side detection (Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc).
Surely the fault couldn't be something as simple as the speed or acceleration sensor becoming saturated? This could throw off even a properly designed, stable feedback loop because the basic analysis doesn't consider nonlinearities. I'm assuming that it is in fact a proper digital feedback system done in hardware (in which case the only software involved is a digital filter responding to periodic interrupt requests), not some wishy-washy software routine that can't be analyzed for stability.
If you're discussing bugs, antennae is correct. If you're talking radio, however, it's "antennas".
Also, recall that the power density drops by the square of the distance from the antenna. So, if you measure the power at one micron away from the antenna, it will be twice the strength you'd get if you measure it two microns away. Extend this out, and at 3 microns, you're down to 1/8th the power, 4 microns = 1/16th. At 20 feet, you should be all the way down to 1 / 3,716,121,600,000th the original power, or about one three-trillionth the original power. Right? So nothing to worry about.
This is incorrect.
At cellular frequencies just microns away from the antenna, you're still in the near field. You need to be at least several wavelengths (1 wavelength ~= 15 centimeters at 2GHz) distance from the source before you start seeing the predictable, far-field inverse square law decay of power.
More importantly, in path loss calculations the distance is effectively normalized to the wavelength [decay ~ (distance/wavelength)^2] rather than some arbitary scale such as a micron.
Rough calculation neglecting any shielding offered by the building:
20 ft ~= 40 wavelengths at 2GHz
Power loss ~= 16*pi^2*40^2 = 2.53E5 = 54 dB
So, neglecting antenna gains and any shielding offered by the building itself, even if the tower was pumping out 1kW (60 dBm), you'd still only see 60 dBm - 54 dB = 6 dBm = 4 milliwatts. This is considerably less than what you're exposed to by putting your cell phone with transmit power ~= 100 milliWatts right next to your head (near field situation). The results are still favourable even if we're talking about 900 MHz cellular instead of 2 GHz.
Actually, if isn't there already a third party server for the XBox?
xbox connect
Just to add to Kendall's post, you might look into PeerGuardian if you're not already using a similar tool. It maintains a large black list of known anti-P2P organization and government IP addresses, and communication is blocked whenever they pose as peers. Not a single download ever passes without numerous access attempts.
If you are already using protection, it must be that either the program failed (blacklist incomplete or out of date) or Verizon is inspecting packets on their own accord. I'd be curious to hear which.
There's a logical solution which would address the problem of what is basically a binary system of payment (full price vs nothing at all) - pay for the amount you play. Aside from the obvious practical issue of getting players to agree to have their play time monitored and recorded, which would be viewed as invasive, it really does make sense in terms of compensating the developer in an amount commensurate with the value derived by the consumer. The scale could be something like: free for the first X hours then Y cents per minute up to a cap of Z dollars, at which point you own the game free and clear and could play as much as you want online or offline. It would be just like a free trial of the full game followed by an extended rental period with a continuous pay-to-play scale over time, and the rental payments are always applied to the purchase price.
Charges wouldn't necessarily have to be applied over time - it could be per level or map in single player or per match in multiplayer - anything that wouldn't leave you feeling ripped off after you discover the game is not to your liking or you just don't have time to play it. Online music stores have already taken advantage of breaking the purchase up into smaller, more digestable chunks by allowing us to buy songs individually instead of only as a full album. The consumer is happy because they actually get what they pay for, and they may be less discriminating about trying new games that look iffy.
Uh, no. Range is not a function of signal power. It more is a function of the overall signal/noise ratio and the sensitivity of the receiver. This includes noise introduced in the transmitter, natural/other noise, and noise introduced in the receiver. An antenna system with gain can both concentrate and attenuate signals, depending on the directivity and where its pointed.
BTW, I got over 1400 miles out of a little 0.3 watt ham signal, but thats no where near as impressive as Earth still being able to receive signals from Voyager 1 and 2 nearly 10 billion miles away. That's impressive.
-Michael
This post is horribly misleading. If range wasn't a function of signal power, why on earth don't we have handsets which operate with microwatt transmit power instead of (typically) something on the order of a tenth of a watt?
Range is certainly a function of transmit power. If you have line of sight between the transmitter and receiver, every factor of 4 increase in transmit power (6 dB) doubles your range. It should be pointed out that often times we don't have line of sight for cellular, even when the base station is sitting on a high rooftop, so the range vs power gains will be less than ideal.
Any increases in range achieved by raising transmit power are above and beyond (independent of) those you get from using directional antennas. I'll spare you the insult of linking a free space path loss article. Obviously, not every wireless communications system is a fixed installation which can take advantage of directional antennas - cell phones need the capability of receiving from any direction, for example - so, in many cases of practical interest, there isn't an option to increase range via antenna directionality.
Lastly, noise introduced at the transmitter is meaningless because it is of much smaller power than the signal and suffers the same channel attenuation before reaching the receiver. Actually, it wouldn't even be properly considered noise in that case - it would an undesired emission, possibly violating whatever EMI / RFI spectral mask regulations govern communication in the band of interest. There's a reason why link budget calculations are always based on noise / inteference at the receiver.
I think you're contradicting your earlier post that 700 MHz would be "far more suitable for cell service than the current ranges", icebike. Penetration and propagation losses, as well as more detailed channel characteristics such as fading rate, fade depth, and delay spread, will be very similar at 700 MHz and 850 MHz simply because, as you pointed out above, the relative change in wavelength is small.
There may be something to talk about when comparing 700 MHz to 2 GHz because that's a factor of 3 difference. Despite the improvement in propagation loss, lowering carrier frequency may carry some technology dependent disadvantages as well - e.g. increase in fade duration makes interleaving less effective, less multipath (good for GSM since it's narrowband, bad for CDMA since the RAKE receiver will give you less performance benefit). I'm tempted to say the PCB footprint size would increase marginally, leading to a slightly larger handset, but I'm not 100% confident on that.
Yup. Not only that, but they've been making bank on shoddy wired controllers for a couple years now. It's fairly well known (by people who would actually notice) that the official Microsoft wired controller has an alarmingly high defect rate, the main problem being "slow turn" with the analog sticks. Basically, even if the stick is pushed all the way over in a certain direction, the reticle transitions very slowly on screen, thus rendering the controller severely impaired for FPS play. I'm talking out-of-the-box failures in many cases, not just typical wear and tear over time. The problem has been noticed most widely in Halo 3 (possibly exacerbated by the "aim acceleration" Bungie uses in its aiming system), but it's also been documented for other shooters.
The problem has been known about for years, but, unlike with the 360 mainboard revisions, MS has done nothing to address it. They continue to sell the identical piece of defective hardware, and I've heard of people spending several hundred dollars on controllers alone because wired is the only option for LAN play at most tournaments. Companies like MyCustomXbox have parlayed this into a business opportunity for themselves by selling "no-slow" wired controllers with an apparent hardware fix.
Their strategy for making up the loses due to selling the console below cost + the RRoD fiasco is becoming apparent - sell crappy, mandatory peripherals at inflated prices.
Don't think so. Regardless of whether the FFT had been invented before the 1960s, it's an understatement to say it has been in widespread within the science, math and engineering communities since then. It really wouldn't have even been considered new technology in the 1970s. Not sure if any of its more recent flavours (such as FFTW) have ever been patented - after all, they're all just efficient implementations of the DFT, which has been around much longer.
The communications technology used by Wifi, which makes heavy use of the FFT, is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Of course, OFDM / multicarrier modulation had also been around long before CSIRO ever filed their patent, so you'd have to off your rocker to claim any novelty there either. And yes, I'm quite confident it was deployed in real world communication systems before 1996.
So what's left? You say CSIRO's FFT chip was the key to the patent. Are you sure there weren't any FFT ASICs floating around before 1996? I'd be extremely surprised if that were the case. In fact, I'd be (slightly less) amazed if OFDM specific ASICs weren't around before 1996.
After skimming the patent document, it seems their main claim to fame is high data rate wireless networking. They freely admit that wireless LANs achieving up to 3-6 Mbps were already available from Motorola. So, basically, they provided a higher data rate solution using OFDM, which was already well-known to be a viable solution for frequency selective channels (which typically arise when using large bandwidths). We could probably have a fruitless, drawn-out argument about whether there is really any novelty here or just a small extension of existing technologies.
That is just mostly people who have "hacked" in a keyboard/mouse combo. When you combine autoaim with a keyboard/mouse you're able to easily beat people who are using the controller. This is particularly true because there are two extreme long distance "one shot kill" weapons as well as a MUCH higher damage value for head shots with ALL weapons. So if you have your little mouse/KB combo you can direct all your fire right at the opposing player's head and they are owned before they even knew you were shooting at them. There isn't much to be done about it. They can turn off autoaim and that would make the mouse/KB combo more awkward. But it would also make controller aiming extremely frustrating. If you want proof of that just try to betray a teammate with a pistol while using the controller. It is virtually impossible because autoaim is turned off when you're aiming at teammates.
I think these claims are speculative and misleading. Have you any evidence that "hacking in" a keyboard/mouse combo in place of a controller is commonplace on XBL? It might be feasible from a technology standpoint, but I've never heard it discussed in regards to Halo 3. I do know that a large portion of the best Halo players don't use any such cheats because they actually attend tournaments in person and win on LAN as well. Believe it or not, there are kids out there, many of them 12 or 13, who are capable of dominating you in Halo without cheating. If you're deluded enought to deny it, go to MLG's site (mlgpro.com) and watch some of the gameplay vids.
I'm wondering whether or not it became apparent that you basically volunteered yourself as the butt of the parent's joke.
Your grasp on Halo mechanics is a little flimsy. First, most weapons in the game aren't even headshot capable, meaning there is no extra damage conveyed by shooting at the opponent's head. Second, even for the medium-long range headshot capable weapons like the Battle Rifle and Carbine, headshots only matter once the opponent's shield is depleted. It's not simply a matter of much higher damage on every shot - once the shield is down (several shots), a single headshot kills instantly as opposed to a few body shots. Actually though, it's not very difficult to land head shots with these weapons anyway because the headshot hitboxes are huge. The sniper rifle kills with a single headshot or two body shots and is much harder to aim in general (low magnetism, small hitbox), so yes, there would be an advantage there.
It's a common error, but what you're really talking about is "aim magnetism" (aka "sticky aim"), not "auto-aim" (aka "aim-assist"). Magnetism causes your reticle to slow down when passed over the opponent (friction) and even be actively dragged when the opponent moves (adhesion). Auto-aim is what causes your shots to land even when your reticle is slightly off-target.
Not much else to say really - it's an FPS, they're supposed to require aiming skill by definition - so of course an aiming cheat would give you an advantage. I don't believe a keyboard + mouse combo would allow a bad / mediocre player to dominate though. There are just too many other elements to the game (grenades, knowledge of spawns, teamwork, decision making, predition, reaction time) besides raw aiming skill.