Obviously any experiment that yields unexpected and reproducable results is great news for quantum theorists.
I'm wondering if the theoretical predictions presented in the article tip the scales toward or away from any of the various theories of quantum structure. In particular:
"SELEX also saw the new meson decay about six times more often than expected into an eta particle (a rarer but well-studied member of the meson family), rather than into the expected particle, called a K meson."
It seems obvious that this experiment highlights a failure in our understanding of the strong force.
15 recent vulnerabilities posted in the last 6 days across all linux distros.
Of the 15; 14 really since 2 are dupe reports of the same exploit in the Gentoo compile of Scorched Earth 3D. (oh no, exploit exploit!)
If you _could_ find out how many bugs were discovered in the same period of time that could in theory be exploitable in any windows applications I have little doubt it would be far greater than 14 due to the pure volumn of windows applications.
The fundamental factor you arn't addressing is the ease with which a typical programmer can develop good bug-free non-exploitable code.
I suspect the weight of MP3's, WareZ and Pr0n on the peer to peer networks has a more to do with the interface than anything else. The current crop are designed for searching and downloading.
People don't search for news unless they are hunting on a topic. People _browse_ news. I suspect it's the more natural transition from a dead-tree newspaper (designed for browsing by topic) and a digital one. If you can design and integrate an engine for browsing news over a P2P network it will make a huge difference.
P2P file networks would sure benefit; once the trust web is designed and established it could just as easily be used to authenticate "official" binary content. I'm thinking Gentoo/Debian apt-get heaven.
Except he was responding to a _possible_ crime. A father and his daughter arguing while she drove. So like responsible citizens they pull over and cool off rather than endangering the rest of us.
Then along comes the pig. He's heard there might be something going on. So his oinks into a situation as an entirely unwanted third party. In his ignorance he demands ID when no crime is evident. When it's not forthcoming he starts arresting people.
It was a blatent abuse of power. Yes, there are rational _reasons_ for the officers actions. But they have to be good reasons that can be applied in every case.
If an acceptable cause for a required ID check is a possible connection to a possible crime then we've just been transported to Berlin 35'
By making that "perfectly valid assumption" you're giving one company a guaranteed monopoly forever. The more entrenched and irreplacable MS becomes the more difficult it is for a competitor to enter the market. Linux, Mac, whatever; even if you don't use them their existance forces MS to compete on every front which makes for a better 'Windows'. If they did not exist then MS would only need to release whatever improvements are sufficient to sell upgrades.
A few of my tax dollars going toward keeping the billion dollar OS market open to competition seems like a pretty good idea.
I don't want one company to decide the path of global computing. How can they help but get it wrong? It's far better to have a vibrant set of competing products with substantial interoperability. Every relases cycle puts a new layer of features on each and the changes are voted in the marketplace. The loosers grab the features of the winners and start working on the next cycle.
I'm fairly sure that's the best possible environment for developing an operating system. You'll note it's how Linux is moving, but the market isn't large enough to keep very many companies afloat.
"'Voluntary' and 'involuntary' are just labels for motivation, which can have many dimensions and factors."
*can* have many dimensions, in this case he's split motivation into two categories and claims they are distinct. Just as psychologists split minds into introvert and extrovert, mathmaticians split numbers into even and odd and politicians split ideologies into liberal and conservative. Some categorical divisions are "black and white". Any distinction between "A" and "not A" is obviously distinct. "Voluntary" and "involuntary" is clearly an "A" and "not A" distinction and perfectly valid. It isn't useful (since it's easy to prove every motivation is involuntary); but it's valid.
"Words are defined by how they are used" Now the question of which of you is stupid gets a bit murky. Definition follows usage but it's common as dirt to use the wrong word. If words are defined by how they are used it isn't possible to use the wrong word (because the wrong word would become the right word as a result of your error). Just because people mix up 'there' and 'their' in usage does not mean they are interchangable nor will they ever become interchangable.
Blah blah.. rights vs abilities is an ethical distinction. In a state of nature the concept of 'rights' is non-existant. In a society the practical dividing line is between the things you can and cannot get away with. What you can do and rely on getting away with is a 'right'. If you may get caught it's an ability.
As for power, that's a different beast. A sensible discussion requires substantial prerequisite agreements to narrow and clarify the scope (it's one of Nietzche's favorite topics).
Briefly put: if the world is a pond; power is the size of your wake as you stride across. It's not a question of ability or rights; it's entirely a matter of action.
(yeah, I'm posting late to a stale topic. No karma for me today)
Good point. I'm curious about some of the edge cases. Redhat Linux is available for free (clearly a ridiculously low price), if Redhat somehow aquired a monopoly in *any* market (plush penguin futures?) would they suddenly become guilty of predatory pricing?
A more interesting case would be the dot coms. Huge piles of VC spent in attempts to take over the online 'market'. Mapquest gives away a service for which we were once accustomed to paying. Presumably there were companies offering similar products at a cost. MQ undercut the price and 'stole' the market, paying out for it's regular losses from a sizable bankroll. I find it difficult to conceive of MQ's actions in aquiring their monopoly as illegal.
The only 'classic' examples I can find are along the lines of oil tycoons taking over oil barrel production and using that aquisition to maintain their oil monopoly, or pricing their product at a loss at one gas station in order to bankrupt nearby competition.
My theory is that selling a product at a loss in order to destroy all existing competition may not be illegal unless/until you inflate prices or use your newly aquired monopoly to help maintain an existing monopoly. Might be wrong, probably am. But as Amazon has managed to demonstrate, selling at a loss can somehow become a buisness plan.
Except MS doesn't have a monopoly in console systems. If they used the monopoly that they _do_ have (how on earth.. why not) Ok, lets say MS included a "free" Xbox with every purchase of WinXP. A strange notion that will never happen, but watch where it goes:
Obviously illegal since they have a monopoly. They may or may not increase the price of XP to cover the additional cost; that isn't really relevant. By attaching an xbox to their monopoly product they consume the console market (more truthfully they consume the portion of the console market which overlaps the OS market). This is clearly unfair competition (it quite literally cannot be competed with).
Suppose now that Sega had included a copy of Redhat with the Dreamcast and boosted the price 20$. Not illegal because Sega does not have a monopoly in the console market and Redhat does not have a monopoly in the OS market. Customers wouldn't like it, but they arn't forced to buy Dreamcast.
A huge portion of the OS consumers are forced to buy MS. Anything MS 'includes' with the OS that is a viable product in it's own right is an abuse of their monopoly position. That includes an Xbox, that includes a web browser, and that includes media players.
In a better world we would see "Windows XP" on the shelf at Kmart for x$, MS Explorer for y$, MS Media Player sitting next to it for z$, Internet Explorer... We would be able to buy what we want. The full API of the OS would be published and we would have a fair market.
It's not going to happen, because $$ runs the world and MS has barrels of it. Wait for the verdict, see MS get it's bloody paws slapped and join the cynics.
In the long run 802.11b like systems (fixed and/or roaming) are going to play a vital role in our communications infrastructure. On this subject I have no doubt whatsoever for a variety of reasons which I will describe in as much detail as possible. Please note that I do work for an 802.11b last-mile provider as a programmer for our edge-device. These are my views, not necessarily those of my employer.
1. It's cheaper; both now and down the road.
Step back and look at the history of telecom. In the beginning was the telegraph, and it was good. But it was point-to-point and we didn't have the technology to do proper routing. Then the telephone, whose basic design has not changed in any significant way. It's a point-to-point device by design with routing mechanisms and conventions (ala area code) added over time.
This is the really interesting part. *If* the telephone were re-implimented with modern technology how would it differ? It's a lot cheaper to build semi-intelligent edge devices now than it was. The number of homes desiring a telephone unconnected to the power grid is substantially smaller, presumably small enough to justify powering edge devices locally instead of carrying juice over the wire.
How about addressing/routing? If each phone has a unique identifier (ala MAC address), you could input whatever personal information you would like to have available to a regional database and impliment basic search functionality into the phone. The switching fabric of the network itself would actually be _simpler_ with ATM pushed all the way to the edge. Mixing data and voice over such a network would be cheap and easy. Phones would cost a lot more, but mass-production on those kinds of scales can do some amazing things (and it wasn't very many years ago that a phone cost 50$ and was only available from ma' bell).
I don't think anyone genuinely doubt that we could make a system many times better and cheaper (once operational) than the staus quo.
The question then turns to why. Why haven't we done it? To a degree we have. Cell phones are a big step between yesterday and tomorrow. Why don't 'normal' phones do everything cell phones can do? Because the cost of re-wiring is too great and our existing infrastructure is not sufficient.
It's a lot like writing software (I'm one of those freaky souls that sees everything as being a whole lot like writing software). We've got a huge amount of complex code written in an obsolete language. It works, but it's hard to modify. The only long-term solution is to rewrite. You must also accept the enduring facts. As technology progresses everything is eventually obsolete.
Back to the point at hand. The initial cost of setting up a nationwide wireless infrastructure is far from insignificant, just as the cost of our wired infrastructure required years of expense. Once a wireless infrastructure has been built it has one huge advantage that wire (sans fibre) cannot overcome. You can upgrade the edges.
A contemporary example. Suppose you have a 802.11b point-to-point link between your house and buisness. It's truckin' along at around 2-4mb (I know the press says 11 but they are ignorant, liars or salesmen). Technology marches on. A few years from now you pick up two 802.11x-like cards and upgrade both sides of your link. You'll probably need to upgrade the antenna as well (I doubt 2.4 will still be the best price/perform in a few years). Total cost around 500$ give or take for at least double the pipe. No change in ongoing cost of operation (maybe a few pennies a month more power).
Lets see any wired solution that's similarly expandable at anything close to those costs. We're playing at the edge of what POTS can do with xDSL. Demand is going up and presumably will continue to rise.
2. Empowerment
Why does your telephone company care about the software that is running on your computer? When you run a web server or a p2p node you're destroying the oversubscription model of their service. Every provider assumes that some portion of the people on their network arn't going to use the bandwidth they are paying for. There is nothing wrong with that. Build a model based on actual usage and ensure that your available bandwidth is sufficient.
Wireless has an inherent advantage with respect to oversubscription. It's a curious thing, but since the boogyman of radio is dropped packets (and the subsequent tcp/ip backoff) traffic shaping is actually simpler. The radio is accustomed to loosing a packet here and there and optimized to deal with it nicely. In the design of a radio system (particularly fixed) the maximum possible number of users is well-known. When that number is reached the system must be expanded (using new channels while it lasts then new towers). Available bandwidth is then a function of tower density (unless/until you reach RF saturation at which point fiber is the only viable solution).
3. Speed and latency
Every time 802.11 comes up on/. or elsewhere there is inevitably a thread about latency. Personally I'm rather fascinated by latency. In absolute terms (a perfect, noiseless system) latency is a function of distance. Any device that queues packets adds latency. Any device that doesn't queue packets adds noise/fragmentation unless it's faster than the datastream. Radio systems generally require reasonably substantial queues for both input and output (thanks to the tendency of packets to get mangled/lost in transit). The most popular form-factor for a computer radio is currently pcmcia. Despite it's numerous advantages this isn't really the 'right' solution. Far better would be mini-PCI (for example). No one will ever make a gigibit pcmcia card.
Exactly what is the bottleneck in 802.11b latency? We know it's not the transmission of the actual radio signal, though any 'extra' ACK'ing or handshaking that's required by the 802.11b protocol will certainly hurt. It's easily provable that wireless is equal in terms of pure information transfer (radio waves travels at c, electrons in copper propagate at c) so any 'extra' latency in radio must come from either the 'creation' of a radio packet or the decomposition of same.
The answer (I'm reasonably sure) is in the soft/firmware Radios have much more verbose error checking and wrap packets in quite a bit of extra protocol. As the hardware improves the time required to process this layer will decrease and we'll see radio latencies approaching wired latencies. Even now a good radio does about as well (in terms of latency) as a cheap NIC.
4. Security
Only morons have a 'problem' with wireless security. Sorry, had to toss in a little ad hominem to 'fit in' with the/. crowd. Seriously, whenever you're radiating information you should be sure to encrypt.
You wouldn't shout a private conversation across a busy lobby. You walk up to the other person and whisper. But nowadays that isn't good enough either. If someone wants to listen in they can use high-tech devices to amplify your whisper and eavesdrop. You're a little paranoid so you write down your message, hand it to someone you trust, they hand it to someone they trust, who hands it to the intended reciever. That's a wired network. There's nothing wrong with that and it has it's place. But are you going to stop talking and live our your life passing notes through people you've decided to trust? Especially when you can switch from english to a language only understood by you and your intended audience? (that's encryption) Sure, a really hot linguist might be able to figure it out (NSA). But again, how much paranoia can you really justify?
5. Noise, Microwaved packets.
As an experiment I setup a point-to-point link from one countertop, through a spectrum analyizer, through a cheap microwave oven, through an equally cheap wall, a few cubes to a lucent AP. I put a big glass of water in the microwave, cranked it up and watched the packets on either side. It was very interesting in a number of ways. First the microwave oven concentrates it energy into a relativly narrow band. It effectivly destroyed the first two channels. Within a few minutes (I was suprised to find that it took so long) the AP and radio hopped over to another channel and resumed transmitting. On the 'noisy' channel about 25% of the packets were garbled. Every licenced device is supposed to change channels to avoid interference (as far as the radio 'knew' the microwave was a transmitter already on that channel). I know for a fact that there are some cordless (funny how different 'wireless' and 'cordless' hit the brain) phones that don't play nice. The failures of telephone manufacturers to produce quality hardware should not be used as an argument against the development of 802.11b devices. Radio hardware manufacturers _could_ be as sloppy as the guys building the crufty phones. Then your phone wouldn't work instead of your 802.11b gear. That's hardly an improvement. This interoperability argument condemns the hardware that is doing the "right thing" in favor of the hardware that isn't. That's obviously an indefensible position in the long run.
I'm done. I doubt anyone will bother to read this as the subject is nearly off the main/. page, but it's good to rant it out every now and then. Apologies to anyone insulted, insults to any apologists.
Re:Integrating protheses in the neural loop
on
Think And Click
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· Score: 1
Certainly we shouldn't start drilling electrode holes in our skulls, but this experiment is a huge step. The 'fantastic difference' is one of degree, not type. In the long run this may be the technology that kills the mouse, keyboard, and eventually monitor. Yes, this is only one step on a long road. But it's one hell of a destination, so the enthusiasm is understandable.
In days gone by, MS and NS compete for the browser market.
NS does so to make a profit. They charge about 30 bucks for a personal licence. They are doing pretty well, they have the majority of the market and are making some money. They have some rough times and some bad releases, but they are a relativly small and extremely young company.
MS realizes that the web contains the potential for true cross-platform applications. Somewhere down the road web servers can evolve into application servers. Any client can access those applications.
This spells doom for microsoft because they are (in their darkest soul of souls) an applications company. If browsers evolve into generic remote application clients then MSFT collapses.
So they pour money into IE. We arn't talking about chump-change, we're talking big bucks to out-develop netscape. First they race to create a viable competitor and give it away.
Who paid to have IE developed? Everyone who has purchased a windows license post NT 3.0 (which was bundled with IE 2.x as I recall).
Microsoft expects us to believe that IE is free. They expect us to believe that Media Player is free. The list is long, because MS is an applications company.
The fundamental fact is; if some independant company had released IE 1.0 as competiton for netscape they could not have made enough money to develop through IE 4.x.
With MS bankrolling IE development they could create a NS competitor (took quite a few versions but they certainly did it), and give it away for free.
Once they reached that step NS had no chance. Income dissolves and NS can no longer afford to develop a competitive product.
So when I hear the "IE is better than netscape, that's why they won" flavor of crap I can only respond with "yes". Microsoft spent hordes of money to create a piece of sotware for which their is (according to the price MS charges) no value.
MS bought the ability to guide the evolution of the Internet. You had better believe they are going to get a huge return on that investment. They seem to believe that the route to capitalization is through.NET. If they are wrong it won't matter because they have a monopoly. They will keep trying until they find a way to extract more money from us.
The essencial question, the one that keeps me up nights is this: Will the abuses of MS's monopoly power force the internet five years down the line to be a shadow of what it could be?
Hey there, I don't have all the details but according to the big-ol' RF map of Atlanta on the wall it looks like we're planning on putting a string of towers south of downtown. I can't give you an ETA but I'm nearly certain the answer is somewhere within the first half of 2002.
Currently Broadlink is being tested by Earthlink as a cheap and expandable wireless solution. I am certain Atlanta customers are going to love our service (fast, cheap and reliable.. what else matters?)
(note: I work for broadlink but I'm a programmer not PR so please consider anything I say as unofficial)
Lets see.. a few little things. The antenna isn't necessarily a square dish; the antenna used depends on local RF characteristics (Broadlink does a lot of RF work before the first tower goes up)
The receiver box has one cat5 cable running into the house and one antenna cable (running to the antenna, imagine that). Power is inserted into unused wires in the cat5 (lots of devices use this technique).
As for the receiver itself; it's an embedded linux system providing bridging, firewall w/port forwarding, NAT masq, dhcp, dns and PPPoE. It's all configurable via a web interface (or telnet).
(note: I work for broadlink but I'm a programmer not PR so please consider anything I say as unofficial)
Slashdot Mirror
Readable Description of the ELF standard
Help from SCO on ELF compatability in SCO OpenServer
Summary of a.out, COFF and ELF from a FreeBSD pov
Nice descriptions of various BFFs (binary file format) including ELF
Release date for Doom III == final day of LinuxWorld.
Coincidence?
If they were friggin' brilliant they would have a Linux build, an ongoing lan game, and a huge mountain of units shrinkwraped and ready-to-sell.
Why is it so difficult to filter out these kinds of hoaxes?
Obviously any experiment that yields unexpected and reproducable results is great news for quantum theorists.
I'm wondering if the theoretical predictions presented in the article tip the scales toward or away from any of the various theories of quantum structure. In particular:
"SELEX also saw the new meson decay about six times more often than expected into an eta particle (a rarer but well-studied member of the meson family), rather than into the expected particle, called a K meson."
It seems obvious that this experiment highlights a failure in our understanding of the strong force.
.*? = snag all chars in non-greedy mode
Close encounter of the fourth kind?
15 recent vulnerabilities posted in the last 6 days across all linux distros.
Of the 15; 14 really since 2 are dupe reports of the same exploit in the Gentoo compile of Scorched Earth 3D. (oh no, exploit exploit!)
If you _could_ find out how many bugs were discovered in the same period of time that could in theory be exploitable in any windows applications I have little doubt it would be far greater than 14 due to the pure volumn of windows applications.
The fundamental factor you arn't addressing is the ease with which a typical programmer can develop good bug-free non-exploitable code.
I suspect the weight of MP3's, WareZ and Pr0n on the peer to peer networks has a more to do with the interface than anything else. The current crop are designed for searching and downloading.
People don't search for news unless they are hunting on a topic. People _browse_ news. I suspect it's the more natural transition from a dead-tree newspaper (designed for browsing by topic) and a digital one. If you can design and integrate an engine for browsing news over a P2P network it will make a huge difference.
P2P file networks would sure benefit; once the trust web is designed and established it could just as easily be used to authenticate "official" binary content. I'm thinking Gentoo/Debian apt-get heaven.
Or that damn paperclip. I don't care how cute-n-furry tux gets; he'll always be the coolest of the cool compared to clippy.
How about getting a .mail subdomain from an ISP? A few bucks extra and you have yourdomain.yourisp.email ready to go.
Except he was responding to a _possible_ crime. A father and his daughter arguing while she drove. So like responsible citizens they pull over and cool off rather than endangering the rest of us.
Then along comes the pig. He's heard there might be something going on. So his oinks into a situation as an entirely unwanted third party. In his ignorance he demands ID when no crime is evident. When it's not forthcoming he starts arresting people.
It was a blatent abuse of power. Yes, there are rational _reasons_ for the officers actions. But they have to be good reasons that can be applied in every case.
If an acceptable cause for a required ID check is a possible connection to a possible crime then we've just been transported to Berlin 35'
By making that "perfectly valid assumption" you're giving one company a guaranteed monopoly forever. The more entrenched and irreplacable MS becomes the more difficult it is for a competitor to enter the market. Linux, Mac, whatever; even if you don't use them their existance forces MS to compete on every front which makes for a better 'Windows'. If they did not exist then MS would only need to release whatever improvements are sufficient to sell upgrades.
A few of my tax dollars going toward keeping the billion dollar OS market open to competition seems like a pretty good idea.
I don't want one company to decide the path of global computing. How can they help but get it wrong? It's far better to have a vibrant set of competing products with substantial interoperability. Every relases cycle puts a new layer of features on each and the changes are voted in the marketplace. The loosers grab the features of the winners and start working on the next cycle.
I'm fairly sure that's the best possible environment for developing an operating system. You'll note it's how Linux is moving, but the market isn't large enough to keep very many companies afloat.
"'Voluntary' and 'involuntary' are just labels for motivation, which can have many dimensions and factors."
*can* have many dimensions, in this case he's split motivation into two categories and claims they are distinct. Just as psychologists split minds into introvert and extrovert, mathmaticians split numbers into even and odd and politicians split ideologies into liberal and conservative. Some categorical divisions are "black and white". Any distinction between "A" and "not A" is obviously distinct. "Voluntary" and "involuntary" is clearly an "A" and "not A" distinction and perfectly valid. It isn't useful (since it's easy to prove every motivation is involuntary); but it's valid.
"Words are defined by how they are used" Now the question of which of you is stupid gets a bit murky. Definition follows usage but it's common as dirt to use the wrong word. If words are defined by how they are used it isn't possible to use the wrong word (because the wrong word would become the right word as a result of your error). Just because people mix up 'there' and 'their' in usage does not mean they are interchangable nor will they ever become interchangable.
Blah blah.. rights vs abilities is an ethical distinction. In a state of nature the concept of 'rights' is non-existant. In a society the practical dividing line is between the things you can and cannot get away with. What you can do and rely on getting away with is a 'right'. If you may get caught it's an ability.
As for power, that's a different beast. A sensible discussion requires substantial prerequisite agreements to narrow and clarify the scope (it's one of Nietzche's favorite topics).
Briefly put: if the world is a pond; power is the size of your wake as you stride across. It's not a question of ability or rights; it's entirely a matter of action.
(yeah, I'm posting late to a stale topic. No karma for me today)
walking down to radio shack every month to get a free battery with my battery club card, checking for a new tandy comic and looking at all the stuff.
/.'s are in the age group targeted by this blatent advertising campaign for a rather pathetic line of computers.
I'm guessing a decent percentage of
Nice memories, thanks.
Good point. I'm curious about some of the edge cases. Redhat Linux is available for free (clearly a ridiculously low price), if Redhat somehow aquired a monopoly in *any* market (plush penguin futures?) would they suddenly become guilty of predatory pricing?
A more interesting case would be the dot coms. Huge piles of VC spent in attempts to take over the online 'market'. Mapquest gives away a service for which we were once accustomed to paying. Presumably there were companies offering similar products at a cost. MQ undercut the price and 'stole' the market, paying out for it's regular losses from a sizable bankroll. I find it difficult to conceive of MQ's actions in aquiring their monopoly as illegal.
The only 'classic' examples I can find are along the lines of oil tycoons taking over oil barrel production and using that aquisition to maintain their oil monopoly, or pricing their product at a loss at one gas station in order to bankrupt nearby competition.
My theory is that selling a product at a loss in order to destroy all existing competition may not be illegal unless/until you inflate prices or use your newly aquired monopoly to help maintain an existing monopoly. Might be wrong, probably am. But as Amazon has managed to demonstrate, selling at a loss can somehow become a buisness plan.
Except MS doesn't have a monopoly in console systems. If they used the monopoly that they _do_ have (how on earth.. why not) Ok, lets say MS included a "free" Xbox with every purchase of WinXP. A strange notion that will never happen, but watch where it goes:
Obviously illegal since they have a monopoly. They may or may not increase the price of XP to cover the additional cost; that isn't really relevant. By attaching an xbox to their monopoly product they consume the console market (more truthfully they consume the portion of the console market which overlaps the OS market). This is clearly unfair competition (it quite literally cannot be competed with).
Suppose now that Sega had included a copy of Redhat with the Dreamcast and boosted the price 20$. Not illegal because Sega does not have a monopoly in the console market and Redhat does not have a monopoly in the OS market. Customers wouldn't like it, but they arn't forced to buy Dreamcast.
A huge portion of the OS consumers are forced to buy MS. Anything MS 'includes' with the OS that is a viable product in it's own right is an abuse of their monopoly position. That includes an Xbox, that includes a web browser, and that includes media players.
In a better world we would see "Windows XP" on the shelf at Kmart for x$, MS Explorer for y$, MS Media Player sitting next to it for z$, Internet Explorer... We would be able to buy what we want. The full API of the OS would be published and we would have a fair market.
It's not going to happen, because $$ runs the world and MS has barrels of it. Wait for the verdict, see MS get it's bloody paws slapped and join the cynics.
Buying an Xbox, loading it up with Linux and _not_ buying any games __hurts__ M$.
You can't actually believe that anyone could make money selling off 733+ Mhz computers w/decent Nvidia graphics chipsets and hard drive for 200 bucks.
In the long run 802.11b like systems (fixed and/or roaming) are going to play a vital role in our communications infrastructure. On this subject I have no doubt whatsoever for a variety of reasons which I will describe in as much detail as possible. Please note that I do work for an 802.11b last-mile provider as a programmer for our edge-device. These are my views, not necessarily those of my employer.
1. It's cheaper; both now and down the road.
Step back and look at the history of telecom. In the beginning was the telegraph, and it was good. But it was point-to-point and we didn't have the technology to do proper routing. Then the telephone, whose basic design has not changed in any significant way. It's a point-to-point device by design with routing mechanisms and conventions (ala area code) added over time.
This is the really interesting part. *If* the telephone were re-implimented with modern technology how would it differ? It's a lot cheaper to build semi-intelligent edge devices now than it was. The number of homes desiring a telephone unconnected to the power grid is substantially smaller, presumably small enough to justify powering edge devices locally instead of carrying juice over the wire.
How about addressing/routing? If each phone has a unique identifier (ala MAC address), you could input whatever personal information you would like to have available to a regional database and impliment basic search functionality into the phone. The switching fabric of the network itself would actually be _simpler_ with ATM pushed all the way to the edge. Mixing data and voice over such a network would be cheap and easy. Phones would cost a lot more, but mass-production on those kinds of scales can do some amazing things (and it wasn't very many years ago that a phone cost 50$ and was only available from ma' bell).
I don't think anyone genuinely doubt that we could make a system many times better and cheaper (once operational) than the staus quo.
The question then turns to why. Why haven't we done it? To a degree we have. Cell phones are a big step between yesterday and tomorrow. Why don't 'normal' phones do everything cell phones can do? Because the cost of re-wiring is too great and our existing infrastructure is not sufficient.
It's a lot like writing software (I'm one of those freaky souls that sees everything as being a whole lot like writing software). We've got a huge amount of complex code written in an obsolete language. It works, but it's hard to modify. The only long-term solution is to rewrite. You must also accept the enduring facts. As technology progresses everything is eventually obsolete.
Back to the point at hand. The initial cost of setting up a nationwide wireless infrastructure is far from insignificant, just as the cost of our wired infrastructure required years of expense. Once a wireless infrastructure has been built it has one huge advantage that wire (sans fibre) cannot overcome. You can upgrade the edges.
A contemporary example. Suppose you have a 802.11b point-to-point link between your house and buisness. It's truckin' along at around 2-4mb (I know the press says 11 but they are ignorant, liars or salesmen). Technology marches on. A few years from now you pick up two 802.11x-like cards and upgrade both sides of your link. You'll probably need to upgrade the antenna as well (I doubt 2.4 will still be the best price/perform in a few years). Total cost around 500$ give or take for at least double the pipe. No change in ongoing cost of operation (maybe a few pennies a month more power).
Lets see any wired solution that's similarly expandable at anything close to those costs. We're playing at the edge of what POTS can do with xDSL. Demand is going up and presumably will continue to rise.
2. Empowerment
Why does your telephone company care about the software that is running on your computer? When you run a web server or a p2p node you're destroying the oversubscription model of their service. Every provider assumes that some portion of the people on their network arn't going to use the bandwidth they are paying for. There is nothing wrong with that. Build a model based on actual usage and ensure that your available bandwidth is sufficient.
Wireless has an inherent advantage with respect to oversubscription. It's a curious thing, but since the boogyman of radio is dropped packets (and the subsequent tcp/ip backoff) traffic shaping is actually simpler. The radio is accustomed to loosing a packet here and there and optimized to deal with it nicely. In the design of a radio system (particularly fixed) the maximum possible number of users is well-known. When that number is reached the system must be expanded (using new channels while it lasts then new towers). Available bandwidth is then a function of tower density (unless/until you reach RF saturation at which point fiber is the only viable solution).
3. Speed and latency
Every time 802.11 comes up on /. or elsewhere there is inevitably a thread about latency. Personally I'm rather fascinated by latency. In absolute terms (a perfect, noiseless system) latency is a function of distance. Any device that queues packets adds latency. Any device that doesn't queue packets adds noise/fragmentation unless it's faster than the datastream. Radio systems generally require reasonably substantial queues for both input and output (thanks to the tendency of packets to get mangled/lost in transit). The most popular form-factor for a computer radio is currently pcmcia. Despite it's numerous advantages this isn't really the 'right' solution. Far better would be mini-PCI (for example). No one will ever make a gigibit pcmcia card.
Exactly what is the bottleneck in 802.11b latency? We know it's not the transmission of the actual radio signal, though any 'extra' ACK'ing or handshaking that's required by the 802.11b protocol will certainly hurt. It's easily provable that wireless is equal in terms of pure information transfer (radio waves travels at c, electrons in copper propagate at c) so any 'extra' latency in radio must come from either the 'creation' of a radio packet or the decomposition of same.
The answer (I'm reasonably sure) is in the soft/firmware Radios have much more verbose error checking and wrap packets in quite a bit of extra protocol. As the hardware improves the time required to process this layer will decrease and we'll see radio latencies approaching wired latencies. Even now a good radio does about as well (in terms of latency) as a cheap NIC.
4. Security
Only morons have a 'problem' with wireless security. Sorry, had to toss in a little ad hominem to 'fit in' with the /. crowd. Seriously, whenever you're radiating information you should be sure to encrypt.
You wouldn't shout a private conversation across a busy lobby. You walk up to the other person and whisper. But nowadays that isn't good enough either. If someone wants to listen in they can use high-tech devices to amplify your whisper and eavesdrop. You're a little paranoid so you write down your message, hand it to someone you trust, they hand it to someone they trust, who hands it to the intended reciever. That's a wired network. There's nothing wrong with that and it has it's place. But are you going to stop talking and live our your life passing notes through people you've decided to trust? Especially when you can switch from english to a language only understood by you and your intended audience? (that's encryption) Sure, a really hot linguist might be able to figure it out (NSA). But again, how much paranoia can you really justify?
5. Noise, Microwaved packets.
As an experiment I setup a point-to-point link from one countertop, through a spectrum analyizer, through a cheap microwave oven, through an equally cheap wall, a few cubes to a lucent AP. I put a big glass of water in the microwave, cranked it up and watched the packets on either side. It was very interesting in a number of ways. First the microwave oven concentrates it energy into a relativly narrow band. It effectivly destroyed the first two channels. Within a few minutes (I was suprised to find that it took so long) the AP and radio hopped over to another channel and resumed transmitting. On the 'noisy' channel about 25% of the packets were garbled. Every licenced device is supposed to change channels to avoid interference (as far as the radio 'knew' the microwave was a transmitter already on that channel). I know for a fact that there are some cordless (funny how different 'wireless' and 'cordless' hit the brain) phones that don't play nice. The failures of telephone manufacturers to produce quality hardware should not be used as an argument against the development of 802.11b devices. Radio hardware manufacturers _could_ be as sloppy as the guys building the crufty phones. Then your phone wouldn't work instead of your 802.11b gear. That's hardly an improvement. This interoperability argument condemns the hardware that is doing the "right thing" in favor of the hardware that isn't. That's obviously an indefensible position in the long run.
I'm done. I doubt anyone will bother to read this as the subject is nearly off the main /. page, but it's good to rant it out every now and then. Apologies to anyone insulted, insults to any apologists.
Certainly we shouldn't start drilling electrode holes in our skulls, but this experiment is a huge step. The 'fantastic difference' is one of degree, not type. In the long run this may be the technology that kills the mouse, keyboard, and eventually monitor. Yes, this is only one step on a long road. But it's one hell of a destination, so the enthusiasm is understandable.
Try crank.net instead of slashdot.
This is so ignorant... sorry for the long post
.NET. If they are wrong it won't matter because they have a monopoly. They will keep trying until they find a way to extract more money from us.
In days gone by, MS and NS compete for the browser market.
NS does so to make a profit. They charge about 30 bucks for a personal licence. They are doing pretty well, they have the majority of the market and are making some money. They have some rough times and some bad releases, but they are a relativly small and extremely young company.
MS realizes that the web contains the potential for true cross-platform applications. Somewhere down the road web servers can evolve into application servers. Any client can access those applications.
This spells doom for microsoft because they are (in their darkest soul of souls) an applications company. If browsers evolve into generic remote application clients then MSFT collapses.
So they pour money into IE. We arn't talking about chump-change, we're talking big bucks to out-develop netscape. First they race to create a viable competitor and give it away.
Who paid to have IE developed? Everyone who has purchased a windows license post NT 3.0 (which was bundled with IE 2.x as I recall).
Microsoft expects us to believe that IE is free. They expect us to believe that Media Player is free. The list is long, because MS is an applications company.
The fundamental fact is; if some independant company had released IE 1.0 as competiton for netscape they could not have made enough money to develop through IE 4.x.
With MS bankrolling IE development they could create a NS competitor (took quite a few versions but they certainly did it), and give it away for free.
Once they reached that step NS had no chance. Income dissolves and NS can no longer afford to develop a competitive product.
So when I hear the "IE is better than netscape, that's why they won" flavor of crap I can only respond with "yes". Microsoft spent hordes of money to create a piece of sotware for which their is (according to the price MS charges) no value.
MS bought the ability to guide the evolution of the Internet. You had better believe they are going to get a huge return on that investment. They seem to believe that the route to capitalization is through
The essencial question, the one that keeps me up nights is this: Will the abuses of MS's monopoly power force the internet five years down the line to be a shadow of what it could be?
Hey there, I don't have all the details but according to the big-ol' RF map of Atlanta on the wall it looks like we're planning on putting a string of towers south of downtown. I can't give you an ETA but I'm nearly certain the answer is somewhere within the first half of 2002.
Currently Broadlink is being tested by Earthlink as a cheap and expandable wireless solution. I am certain Atlanta customers are going to love our service (fast, cheap and reliable.. what else matters?)
(note: I work for broadlink but I'm a programmer not PR so please consider anything I say as unofficial)
Lets see.. a few little things. The antenna isn't necessarily a square dish; the antenna used depends on local RF characteristics (Broadlink does a lot of RF work before the first tower goes up)
The receiver box has one cat5 cable running into the house and one antenna cable (running to the antenna, imagine that). Power is inserted into unused wires in the cat5 (lots of devices use this technique).
As for the receiver itself; it's an embedded linux system providing bridging, firewall w/port forwarding, NAT masq, dhcp, dns and PPPoE. It's all configurable via a web interface (or telnet).
(note: I work for broadlink but I'm a programmer not PR so please consider anything I say as unofficial)
I know that and you know that, but sometimes you've got to wave the chicken.