Australia does not have any unlicensed spectrum, at least not between 9 KHz and almost to daylight. 2.4 GHz is a licensed frequency, covered by what is called a Class License. This provides the ability for equipment that meets the technical requirements to be automatically licensed. One of the requirements of the Class License, as noted by the ACMA (www.acma.gov.au), is that you must accept any interference from other parties.
What this means is that you cannot require anyone to not operate on the same frequency as you. They can use their own transmitters, and you cannot stop them. If they want to use a wireless video sender on the same frequency, wiping you out, this is not an issue.
This is why major sporting events stay away from unlicensed frequencies as much as possible. During the Sydney Olympics, I had six helicopters for TV coverage. Video signals were all on licensed frequencies in the 2.5 and 5 GHz ranges, and GPS tracking, telemetry and communications was in the 520 MHz range. Cell phone devices were not used, and are still mostly not used due to frequency congestion. As an aside, during a test, we used telemetry frequency a few MHz lower, but found the GPS was not working well. Turns out 3 x frequency + IF frequency was slap bang in the middle of the GPS transmissions.
My definition of OPEN SOURCE is that the source is available for viewing and personal use. This is closer to the original NETSCAPE version of OPEN SOURCE than the FSF version.
Frankly, Open Source is whatever the author wants it to be. I think there is only one thing that can determine if the source is open. That is if the source can be examined and recompiled to fix bugs, in line with the original license of the program. I know that this is not a universally held view, but I am sticking to it.
I have thought about this a lot... and there are some simple solutions.
1. When the air outside is cooler than the air in your computer room, bring air in from outside via the Air Conditioner. Why cool air when Mother Nature cools the air for you.
2. Combine the hot air from your servers into a duct. Have this go up to the roof. In most cases send the hot air outside. Why cool air that you have just heated.
3. Use natural cooling when possible. If you can just use the warm air for heating in the rest of the building things will be a heap cheaper to run all arount.
This is the reason that TAPR created the Open Hardware License. It is available in two versions - the Open Hardware License, and the Non-Commercial Open Hardware License. The former is like GPL for hardware, and the latter provides a license that can be used to allow a company to open a design without giving their competitors the chance to use the design commercially.
It is designed to provide many protections including of the circuit designs and layouts, and patent protection.
I guess I will need to get a copy of the new DVD of Tron. I have a copy of the DVD without commentry, but alas, I cannot replace it. You see, it is signed by a friend who worked on the Movie, the late Bill Kovacs who went on to found Wavefront. Bill worked on Tron from a small office in Burbank - a fantastic little place which the Californinan Govenor also worked for at one stage, although Arnold's job was to rebuild the reception area. I would like to think that Arnold was working there when Tron was made. Bill worked on the scene where the main character was 'digitized' into the computer - such a cool scene.
Bill ended up getting an Academy Award for basically everything he did. Argh... Bill was so down to earth - he inherited from Stanley Kubric the concept that awards were not what really mattered, but that is another story.
Basically once you add a second transmitter on the same frrequency the noise floor increases. Basically the first transmitter adds noise to the second transmitter, and vice vera. Some people will argue that if you know what the first signal is then you can subtract it to find out the second signal. Things do not work like this since the first signal is distorted in the ether, meaning that you cannot properly subtract it.
If there was the bandwidth available to have the two different transmitters on the same frequency (such as with CDMA), according to Shannon you could then just use the original transmitter and double the amount of data you are sending from it. This might mean doubling the power to get the same energy transmitter per bit, or it may mean that there is already enough power being transmitted thanks to error detection and correction.
This scheme is NOT MIMO. I think you would call it MISO or SIMO.
With MULTIPLE FREQUENCIES this COULD work. It is not that hard. On the receieve side you have two receivers and two buffers, maybe up to 1/2 second long. The data being receieved comes in inside packets. What you then do is split things at the transmit side so that each transmitter is sending half the signal.
But this is where things get fun. Each half of the signal need to be able to generate an OK signal by themselves. Think 128K MP3's Vs 64K MP3's. The 64K ones dound crap, but the 128K sound good. The trick is to define an algorithm to generate the 64's so that they can be combined to create a 128K that sounds good. Using Discrete Cosine Transforms this should not be too much trouble, for instance interleaving the data between the two output paths so that if only one is receieved you still have a picture....
Not sure if anyone has looked at the links to this article, but the text to the amendment to the act cited at the end of the article was approved in 2004, and is not related at all. In fact the amendment to the act was slightly changed with an 18 month period listed instead of 12 months.
The admenment act is basically just, as far as I can tell, making some parts of the act plainer, saying that a router which buffers packets in memory is not actually storing those packets just because it needs to store them for a few milliseconds. It also clarifies that VoIP is not stored communications.
CWOP is the Citizen Weather Observation Programme, a part of NOAA. You can find the data on http://www.wxqa.com/ all about this data. The problem for the private weather industry is that all this data is freely available, and is not able to be restricted in availability thanks to the infrastructure...
With CWOP, all the data is sent to http://www.findu.com/ where anyone can retrieve the data.
Weather data is free this way, thanks to the support of Ham Radio operators internet infrastructure.
This is totally flawed... Most DOS attacks are DDOS - distributed. That is MANY users attacking one user. Now, each of these many is often using their entire bandwidth to attack the single user.
So to stop the DDOS attack, you need to take down every DOS user. And to do that you need to send enough data back to flood their bandwidth or kill their computer.
The problem is that it is hard for one user to DOS another user, but is doable. Having one user DOS many users is very hard. Doing this whilst under a DOS attack is almost impossible.
Sure, we all like revenge, and like to be doing something, but I can find better ways to fighting back than this. I like to win, and you cannot win like this
Dell is very good with providing parts to the general public... Unfortunately sometimes they provide parts that are not quite new, and occasionally with the belzel arround the screen it is worse...
For instance I got one belzel with the screw holes broken when I got a replacement Belzel.
Here in Oz, the Trade Practices Act means that if consumers must be able to buy spare parts as if it was the company itself doing the repairs
These researchers are a bunch of complete idiots. Microwave ovens are DESIGNED to operate over a varying range of frequencies. BY DESIGN.
The reason for this is that the variations in frequency mean that there are fewer "Hot Spots" in the oven where all the microwaves pass through, causing food to be cooked in a non-uniform manner.
The other reason that I know these people are not as intelligent as they could be is that magnetrons are modulated at 50/60 Hz specifically. By removing this modulation many of the effects can be removed similar to 'placing magnets'.
But WHY would you want to do this? The only reason I can see is if you want to turn your microwave into a 2.4 GHz frequency source at 700W... [Electronics World magazine has an article on this BTW].
As for the absorbtion of H20 being at 2.4 GHz, you are only off by an order or magnitude. The 2.4 GHz causes excitation of the O-H bond in H20... not absorbtion
Has anyone concidered how bad this might be for the local economy. After all, the $1.5M in the bank account was probably the only reason that the bank was even open...
I am just concerned how the local economy is going to handle so much less money coming in. This was probably 80% of the business at the bank:-)
Question: Is the company Microsoft? Answer: Could be... Reason: Well, how many LINUX computers are being used to run MICROSOFT, or at least how many do they publically state that they are using to run the business.
Lets face it, if they pay $6000 for a server license, and the publicity convinces 50 people to buy Windows Server 2003 licenses, they have a fantastic return on investment...
Additional Question: Was it the full organisation, or one part of it?
Comment: Well, most of these organisations are large, so just imagine if one division spent $50,000 on licenses and only for that division. Would this press release still be true... probably:-)
The only problem is that a few minutes with a colour copier will allow you to remove the VOID... It is just an issue of getting the colour balance correct
Go for plastic bank notes like australia. They work well... They even have clear patches you can see right through.
It's not GNU/Linux Godamit!!! It is minix/LINIX
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 1
I hate this... The GNU people are hijacking linux. Sure a lot of the Utilities are ***NOW*** from the GNU project, but not all, and certainly that was not the situation from the start.
Since originally LINUX was semi-compatible with minix... And all the utilities were MINIX ones... So I suppose you could call it minix/LINIX
It seems to me that a college without Microsoft is just as bad, or worse than one without Linux.
Lets just ignore for a moment that certain software is only available from microsoft - or at least that there are no comparible products from other supplilers.
By having no microsoft you are forcing everyone into the same mindset. Microsoft is the predominant software supplier, but that does not make their products necesarily bad.
University's are there to broaden knowledge, not to stifle it. This seems to me like a great way to stifle knowledge, and restrict achademic freedom.
I have been in the Linux community since the MINIX days, so I am not a Microsoft lover. I just feel that diversity is needed, rather than uniformity
I think I was one of the last visitors to Mt Stromlo... I was there just before closing on Friday afternoon, and for some reason did not take any photos... That was a mistake.
There has also not been any people at the Tidbinbilla NASA facility since midnight saturday night according to reports, but it is likely not to get any damage since it is in a field rather than trees. I can assure you that I would not like to be trapped there during a fire since there was a pine forrest right arround, but from memory none closer than about 2 miles.
One of my friends evacuated his computer room at work to his house - with US$500K of equipment in his safe lounge room at home.
I am now back in Sydney... And glad to be out... There are still 750,000 people without power...
I need to say firstly that I am a board member from TAPR, and a member of the ARRL. These are my own views however.
>What does all this mean? In the 2.4 GHz band part 15 wireless networking devices are at the mercy of the other licensed users of the band.
Exactly. Basically if an 802.11 user is causing harmful interference to a Part 97 Amateur Station they can be required to stop operating.
Think of that University Campus... If there was a HAM station attempting to recieve low power 2.4 GHz and this was being interfered with by the Uni, the Uni would have to turn off 802.11 stuff.
But this does not happen very often in practice since 802.11 is fairly low power and will cope with most interferemce, and just sounds like white noise anyway
>I'd really like to experiment with new modes, and that's difficult enough (the regulations on >spread spectrum communications are EXTREMELY strict, since the FCC has to be able to monitor >your communications). Going through that hassle may be worth if you're experimenting with >something new. Carrying 802.11 over to amateur radio is to me neither innovative nor interesting
Realistically using 802.11 is interesting... It is returning 802.11 to its roots. 802.11 has been copied from the Ham AX25 protocol. 802.11 uses station names called the SSID. These are part of the callsign in AX25.
802.11 can be changed in frequency, changed in power, and modified beyond belief. There are many things that are illegal under part 15 that you can do under part 97...
New protocols are really just the start.
>Only a few channels (up to 14) have been defined for 802.11 use, >and it only works because transmitters have limited range
This is not accurate. There are 14 center frequencies, but only THREE channels.
What is needed...
What 802.11 really needs is its EXCLUSIVE FREQUENCY - which is not going to happen:-(
It was the Santa Cruz Operation was it now... But whos Operation was it? From memory it was MICROSOFT's Santa Cruz Operation. The SCO www site does not really describe this part of their history, but check the quote below.
"Seventh Edition UNIX was licensed by Micorsoft who used it to develop their XENIX operating system which was subsequently jointly developed by SCO"
>unless it is illegal for John Young (a resident of New York IIRC) to post them.
This is a grand jury investigation - something that we don't have here in Oz. But from what I know of a legal system you are not permitted to inform anyone about a grand jury investigation.
Revealing information about an ongoing grand jury investigation is from what I gather contempt of court, and is very serious.
Darryl
Easier way to unsubscribe from EarthLink
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 0
G'Day
I subscribed to earthlink when I was doing some business in the USA. I knew about only being able to cancel by letter or 1-800. But I wanted to cancel from Sydney.
So I did. I changed my credit card number to a number that did not work, but was valid according to the algorithm. After a few weeks I got an email telling me it did not work.
I replied telling them I wanted to cancel the service, and did not feel like ringing the number. This worked after a few exchanges, and I no longer have an earthlink account.
Speaking of StarTrek, I picked up some StarTrek TriCorder computer mice with lights and sound effects when I was in the Hollywood Entertainment Museum [7000 Hollywood Blvd, or somewhere close to that at least].
They sold out of them in the beginning of December, but got more stock at the end of January. Also the museum has the bridge from ST:TNG, and will let you sit in it...
Slashdot Mirror
Hi All
Australia does not have any unlicensed spectrum, at least not between 9 KHz and almost to daylight. 2.4 GHz is a licensed frequency, covered by what is called a Class License. This provides the ability for equipment that meets the technical requirements to be automatically licensed. One of the requirements of the Class License, as noted by the ACMA (www.acma.gov.au), is that you must accept any interference from other parties.
What this means is that you cannot require anyone to not operate on the same frequency as you. They can use their own transmitters, and you cannot stop them. If they want to use a wireless video sender on the same frequency, wiping you out, this is not an issue.
This is why major sporting events stay away from unlicensed frequencies as much as possible. During the Sydney Olympics, I had six helicopters for TV coverage. Video signals were all on licensed frequencies in the 2.5 and 5 GHz ranges, and GPS tracking, telemetry and communications was in the 520 MHz range. Cell phone devices were not used, and are still mostly not used due to frequency congestion. As an aside, during a test, we used telemetry frequency a few MHz lower, but found the GPS was not working well. Turns out 3 x frequency + IF frequency was slap bang in the middle of the GPS transmissions.
Darryl
My definition of OPEN SOURCE is that the source is available for viewing and personal use. This is closer to the original NETSCAPE version of OPEN SOURCE than the FSF version.
Frankly, Open Source is whatever the author wants it to be. I think there is only one thing that can determine if the source is open. That is if the source can be examined and recompiled to fix bugs, in line with the original license of the program. I know that this is not a universally held view, but I am sticking to it.
Darryl
I have thought about this a lot... and there are some simple solutions.
1. When the air outside is cooler than the air in your computer room, bring air in from outside via the Air Conditioner. Why cool air when Mother Nature cools the air for you.
2. Combine the hot air from your servers into a duct. Have this go up to the roof. In most cases send the hot air outside. Why cool air that you have just heated.
3. Use natural cooling when possible. If you can just use the warm air for heating in the rest of the building things will be a heap cheaper to run all arount.
Darryl
This is the reason that TAPR created the Open Hardware License. It is available in two versions - the Open Hardware License, and the Non-Commercial Open Hardware License. The former is like GPL for hardware, and the latter provides a license that can be used to allow a company to open a design without giving their competitors the chance to use the design commercially.
It is designed to provide many protections including of the circuit designs and layouts, and patent protection.
Darryl
P.S. I am on the board of TAPR
I guess I will need to get a copy of the new DVD of Tron. I have a copy of the DVD without commentry, but alas, I cannot replace it. You see, it is signed by a friend who worked on the Movie, the late Bill Kovacs who went on to found Wavefront. Bill worked on Tron from a small office in Burbank - a fantastic little place which the Californinan Govenor also worked for at one stage, although Arnold's job was to rebuild the reception area. I would like to think that Arnold was working there when Tron was made. Bill worked on the scene where the main character was 'digitized' into the computer - such a cool scene.
Bill ended up getting an Academy Award for basically everything he did. Argh... Bill was so down to earth - he inherited from Stanley Kubric the concept that awards were not what really mattered, but that is another story.
Darryl
This is COMPLETE RUBBISH.
Basically once you add a second transmitter on the same frrequency the noise floor increases. Basically the first transmitter adds noise to the second transmitter, and vice vera. Some people will argue that if you know what the first signal is then you can subtract it to find out the second signal. Things do not work like this since the first signal is distorted in the ether, meaning that you cannot properly subtract it.
If there was the bandwidth available to have the two different transmitters on the same frequency (such as with CDMA), according to Shannon you could then just use the original transmitter and double the amount of data you are sending from it. This might mean doubling the power to get the same energy transmitter per bit, or it may mean that there is already enough power being transmitted thanks to error detection and correction.
This scheme is NOT MIMO. I think you would call it MISO or SIMO.
With MULTIPLE FREQUENCIES this COULD work. It is not that hard. On the receieve side you have two receivers and two buffers, maybe up to 1/2 second long. The data being receieved comes in inside packets. What you then do is split things at the transmit side so that each transmitter is sending half the signal.
But this is where things get fun. Each half of the signal need to be able to generate an OK signal by themselves. Think 128K MP3's Vs 64K MP3's. The 64K ones dound crap, but the 128K sound good. The trick is to define an algorithm to generate the 64's so that they can be combined to create a 128K that sounds good. Using Discrete Cosine Transforms this should not be too much trouble, for instance interleaving the data between the two output paths so that if only one is receieved you still have a picture....
Darryl...
Not sure if anyone has looked at the links to this article, but the text to the amendment to the act cited at the end of the article was approved in 2004, and is not related at all. In fact the amendment to the act was slightly changed with an 18 month period listed instead of 12 months.
The admenment act is basically just, as far as I can tell, making some parts of the act plainer, saying that a router which buffers packets in memory is not actually storing those packets just because it needs to store them for a few milliseconds. It also clarifies that VoIP is not stored communications.
Any citations of the actual amendment?
Darryl
CWOP is the Citizen Weather Observation Programme, a part of NOAA. You can find the data on http://www.wxqa.com/ all about this data. The problem for the private weather industry is that all this data is freely available, and is not able to be restricted in availability thanks to the infrastructure...
With CWOP, all the data is sent to http://www.findu.com/ where anyone can retrieve the data.
Weather data is free this way, thanks to the support of Ham Radio operators internet infrastructure.
Darryl Smith, VK2TDS
Sydney. Australia
This is totally flawed... Most DOS attacks are DDOS - distributed. That is MANY users attacking one user. Now, each of these many is often using their entire bandwidth to attack the single user.
So to stop the DDOS attack, you need to take down every DOS user. And to do that you need to send enough data back to flood their bandwidth or kill their computer.
The problem is that it is hard for one user to DOS another user, but is doable. Having one user DOS many users is very hard. Doing this whilst under a DOS attack is almost impossible.
Sure, we all like revenge, and like to be doing something, but I can find better ways to fighting back than this. I like to win, and you cannot win like this
Darryl
Dell is very good with providing parts to the general public... Unfortunately sometimes they provide parts that are not quite new, and occasionally with the belzel arround the screen it is worse...
For instance I got one belzel with the screw holes broken when I got a replacement Belzel.
Here in Oz, the Trade Practices Act means that if consumers must be able to buy spare parts as if it was the company itself doing the repairs
Darryl
These researchers are a bunch of complete idiots. Microwave ovens are DESIGNED to operate over a varying range of frequencies. BY DESIGN.
The reason for this is that the variations in frequency mean that there are fewer "Hot Spots" in the oven where all the microwaves pass through, causing food to be cooked in a non-uniform manner.
The other reason that I know these people are not as intelligent as they could be is that magnetrons are modulated at 50/60 Hz specifically. By removing this modulation many of the effects can be removed similar to 'placing magnets'.
But WHY would you want to do this? The only reason I can see is if you want to turn your microwave into a 2.4 GHz frequency source at 700W... [Electronics World magazine has an article on this BTW].
As for the absorbtion of H20 being at 2.4 GHz, you are only off by an order or magnitude. The 2.4 GHz causes excitation of the O-H bond in H20... not absorbtion
Darryl
You mean that you dont have a Kangaroo in your back yard to ride to work?
The Kangaroo looks great in the yard... Perfect with the view of Bondi Beach, the Opera House and Syndey Harbour Bridge.
BTW, I am organizing a road trip to drive from Sydney to New Zealand next week... Anyone interested?
Has anyone concidered how bad this might be for the local economy. After all, the $1.5M in the bank account was probably the only reason that the bank was even open...
:-)
I am just concerned how the local economy is going to handle so much less money coming in. This was probably 80% of the business at the bank
Darryl
Question: Is the company Microsoft?
:-)
Answer: Could be...
Reason: Well, how many LINUX computers are being used to run MICROSOFT, or at least how many do they publically state that they are using to run the business.
Lets face it, if they pay $6000 for a server license, and the publicity convinces 50 people to buy Windows Server 2003 licenses, they have a fantastic return on investment...
Additional Question: Was it the full organisation, or one part of it?
Comment: Well, most of these organisations are large, so just imagine if one division spent $50,000 on licenses and only for that division. Would this press release still be true... probably
The only problem is that a few minutes with a colour copier will allow you to remove the VOID... It is just an issue of getting the colour balance correct
Go for plastic bank notes like australia. They work well... They even have clear patches you can see right through.
I hate this... The GNU people are hijacking linux. Sure a lot of the Utilities are ***NOW*** from the GNU project, but not all, and certainly that was not the situation from the start.
Since originally LINUX was semi-compatible with minix... And all the utilities were MINIX ones... So I suppose you could call it minix/LINIX
Darryl
It seems to me that a college without Microsoft is just as bad, or worse than one without Linux.
Lets just ignore for a moment that certain software is only available from microsoft - or at least that there are no comparible products from other supplilers.
By having no microsoft you are forcing everyone into the same mindset. Microsoft is the predominant software supplier, but that does not make their products necesarily bad.
University's are there to broaden knowledge, not to stifle it. This seems to me like a great way to stifle knowledge, and restrict achademic freedom.
I have been in the Linux community since the MINIX days, so I am not a Microsoft lover. I just feel that diversity is needed, rather than uniformity
Oops... Only 75,000 people... 25% of the population of canberra are out of power...
Also... back in 1999, I was told that 'Mt Stromlo only has a 5-10 year life due to light polution'...
Seems that maybe Mt Stromlo observatory might be rebuilt, but not on Mt Stromlo
I think I was one of the last visitors to Mt Stromlo... I was there just before closing on Friday afternoon, and for some reason did not take any photos... That was a mistake.
There has also not been any people at the Tidbinbilla NASA facility since midnight saturday night according to reports, but it is likely not to get any damage since it is in a field rather than trees. I can assure you that I would not like to be trapped there during a fire since there was a pine forrest right arround, but from memory none closer than about 2 miles.
One of my friends evacuated his computer room at work to his house - with US$500K of equipment in his safe lounge room at home.
I am now back in Sydney... And glad to be out... There are still 750,000 people without power...
Darryl
I need to say firstly that I am a board member from TAPR, and a member of the ARRL. These are my own views however.
:-(
>What does all this mean? In the 2.4 GHz band part 15 wireless networking devices are at the mercy of the other licensed users of the band.
Exactly. Basically if an 802.11 user is causing harmful interference to a Part 97 Amateur Station they can be required to stop operating.
Think of that University Campus... If there was a HAM station attempting to recieve low power 2.4 GHz and this was being interfered with by the Uni, the Uni would have to turn off 802.11 stuff.
But this does not happen very often in practice since 802.11 is fairly low power and will cope with most interferemce, and just sounds like white noise anyway
>I'd really like to experiment with new modes, and that's difficult enough (the regulations on
>spread spectrum communications are EXTREMELY strict, since the FCC has to be able to monitor
>your communications). Going through that hassle may be worth if you're experimenting with
>something new. Carrying 802.11 over to amateur radio is to me neither innovative nor interesting
Realistically using 802.11 is interesting... It is returning 802.11 to its roots. 802.11 has been copied from the Ham AX25 protocol. 802.11 uses station names called the SSID. These are part of the callsign in AX25.
802.11 can be changed in frequency, changed in power, and modified beyond belief. There are many things that are illegal under part 15 that you can do under part 97...
New protocols are really just the start.
>Only a few channels (up to 14) have been defined for 802.11 use,
>and it only works because transmitters have limited range
This is not accurate. There are 14 center frequencies, but only THREE channels.
What is needed...
What 802.11 really needs is its EXCLUSIVE FREQUENCY - which is not going to happen
Darryl
Does anyone remember who SCO is/was?
It was the Santa Cruz Operation was it now... But whos Operation was it? From memory it was MICROSOFT's Santa Cruz Operation. The SCO www site does not really describe this part of their history, but check the quote below.
"Seventh Edition UNIX was licensed by Micorsoft who used it to develop their XENIX operating system which was subsequently jointly developed by SCO"
Darryl
>unless it is illegal for John Young (a resident of New York IIRC) to post them.
This is a grand jury investigation - something that we don't have here in Oz. But from what I know of a legal system you are not permitted to inform anyone about a grand jury investigation.
Revealing information about an ongoing grand jury investigation is from what I gather contempt of court, and is very serious.
Darryl
G'Day
I subscribed to earthlink when I was doing some business in the USA. I knew about only being able to cancel by letter or 1-800. But I wanted to cancel from Sydney.
So I did. I changed my credit card number to a number that did not work, but was valid according to the algorithm. After a few weeks I got an email telling me it did not work.
I replied telling them I wanted to cancel the service, and did not feel like ringing the number. This worked after a few exchanges, and I no longer have an earthlink account.
Darryl
Speaking of StarTrek, I picked up some StarTrek TriCorder computer mice with lights and sound effects when I was in the Hollywood Entertainment Museum [7000 Hollywood Blvd, or somewhere close to that at least].
They sold out of them in the beginning of December, but got more stock at the end of January. Also the museum has the bridge from ST:TNG, and will let you sit in it...
Darryl