On the
porkchop plot, according to the legend at the top, the various curves are plots of the variables:
C3L
TTIME
SEP
Ls
Can anyone tell us what those mean? Even just a few words that we can then go google. The body of the article mentioned a few things (like time-of-day orbital plane at Mars) but didn't explicitly correlate those ideas to the variable names.
I develop web applications and there are times when a client asks for something that simply isn't feasible (or perhaps possible) in Netscape 4.x, so we inform the client of that and, effectively, prohibit them from using Netscape 4.x to access the application. I don't see much of a difference here.
There's a huge difference -- Netscape 4.x is a hacked up non-compliant mess that has been on web developers hit list for years.
3Com Audrey. 25,000 built, failed in the market, currently being liquidated at 80% discount via TigerDirect.com. By the $90 unit and the $30 ethernet adapter.
Each cellular phone has two halves to its radio frequency (RF) section: one for transmit (TX) and one for receive (RX).
The TX stage is totally designed to talk to the base station, and nobody else. That means it can only push low power (base station has big expensive high gain receive systems to extract signal from noise) and only at the TX frequency band.
Similary, the RX stage is designed to hear from the base station, and nobody else. That means it expects rather high power signals (base station is not running on batteries and can generate huge power if needed) and only at the RX frequency band.
This is the most fundamental part of
RF network design -- do the small remote stations (handsets in this case) need to talk directly to each other, or just to a hub station (base in this case) that is equipped with a collosally more expensive array of equipment? THAT decision (and bitrates) drives ALL the remaining design decisions in the RF sections of both the remote and hub.
These kinds of things are fixed in hardware (e.g. capacitors and inductors, filters) and can't just be changed by downloading new firmware.
We blast Microsoft for its claim that it is an innovator, but has there been much
innovation in Linux kernel devlelopment lately?
In applications? Perhaps not.
But in the kernel? Oh jeez, hell yes. They're spanking MS in the kernel. My point is that the kernel (aka what Linus controls) is very proscribed. Linux applications all seem to be pollyanna, but the kernel has got some seriously advanced CS going into it...
As others have confirmed here, in Mozilla you can disable any javascript method or property on a site by site basis.
The next big monthly-ish milestone release of Mozilla (0.9.4) is likely to come out in a day or two -- they're working on verification builds today. Also, the recently released Netscape 6.1 is out and also very good (muuuuuuch better than 6.0).
I've been using 0.9.3 for a month now and it's great. Every time I hit a web site that crashed Netscape 4.x or takes forever to layout, I just switch over to Mozilla and it works EVERY TIME.
The only reason I still use NS 4.x is that Cookie Pal doesn't support 6.x yet.
Of course, basically, anything you do is bad for at some level, so I guess it's choosing your poisons.
Oh, hogwash.
This is precisely the lazy outlook that has been infesting TV journalism (especially on the local level) for years now. "Gee, Biff, now those wacky scientists are saying cholesterol is good for you! Didn't they just say it was bad! Oh pshaw, I'll just ignore it all! Tee hee!"
The serious, respected newspapers of this country (NYT, WP, WSJ, LAT, MH) will always couch these kinds of "latest research" reports in plenty of CONTEXTUAL writing explaining how this fits into the larger body of scientific knowledge. Is this a revolutionary new finding? Has it been corroborated? If it appears to refute earlier results, does it really, or is that not the correct conclusion to draw? All these questions are normally left unanswered in your hometown paper, which is just dumping the press releases straight from the fax machine into the news hole without any actual editorial involvement.
Just keep this in mind as the last of the independent newspapers get bought up by public companies and start to shift to "news you can use" and big color photos.
This article is wonderfully written, and is precisely right about so many issues (stunning cell phone network rollout rates killing satellite, LEO vs GEO, latency). But at the very end, he goofed:
The New Ico satellite design is based on a bent-pipe architecture
that directly relays signals between an end-user terminal and a ground-based
gateway station. Each satellite is equipped with more computing power than
600 Pentium III-based computers. In addition, each satellite features an
active-array S-band (2.5-GHz) antenna that can form as many as 163
simultaneous coverage beams.
I believe the author is contradicting himself here. A bent-pipe design basically means that there is no onboard processing of the signals -- it just get reflected back down to earth, definitely at a different frequency and perhaps in a slightly different direction, but no demod/remod and switching that would required that computing horsepower.
There is certainly no need for 600 Pentiums in true bent-pipe designs -- satellites have long run on far less computing power than we all have on our desktops. What they do have is gold-plated analog RF technology -- you don't get to service those amplifiers and converters if they fail, so they better Just Work, and for at least 15 years straight.
I am not familiar with the ICO Global network, but this article does nothing to help clarify whether it is or is not a bent-pipe design. I think it probably isn't, but he misunderstands the usage of "bent-pipe" in the satcom industry. Otherwise an excellent job!
Because they use Bugzilla to track all issues with Mozilla. Since people complain daily about the symptoms that turn out to be glibc problems, it's best to include the info in the bug report and just point people there.
That's also the place to debate the issue.
There are plenty of "bugs" that aren't, including feature-requests, user error, bad HTML/websites (e.g. the TLS mess), et cetera.
In addition to the issues of "people won't/are afraid to download", there's the issue of download-installs failing.
Quote: Mozilla also ships without a JVM, and the first time you try to access a site that needs Java it'll tell you about that and ask if you want to download.
My point is that pre-installed components work better because the vendor gets to work out all the problems up front, instead of blasting it out to the world for 6.1 billion people to figure out for themselves.
Go back to high school and review what your Chemistry teacher taught you about significant digits.
12.24 km/sec does not equal 7.605936 miles/sec, even if you've got a conversion factor with a gazillion digits. The measurement has the same limited precision (4 digits in this case) no matter what units you use to express it.
Until last Friday, I worked for the company that won the contract for providing the "subscriber terminals", or the devices on the aircraft that receive and transmit the signals to and from the satellite.
See Boeing's FAQ about it here. The only technical info I saw was that Boeing has "a proprietary solid-state phased array receive and transmit antenna" that they will use, which solves the antenna gain problem.
Based on ViaSat's other [publicly announced] activities, I would expect that the link from the hub (ground) to the remote (aircraft) will be a standard fat DVB carrier, and the return transmitted from the aircraft will be a CDMA / spread spectrum modulation of some sort. ViaSat has some patents on technology that allow them to acheive dramatic savings in bandwidth, which is outrageously expensive on satellites. This returnlink is the real sexy part of the system, the kind of thing that makes engineers want to toil long hours to make it work...
Further, it's interesting to note that Boeing's FAQ says that the space segment will be "leased satellite transponders". This is the same old "bent pipe" design that has worked well for the past 30 years -- for example, Ku-band is 14 GHz up, 12 GHz down, and all the satellite does is mirror the signals it receives on the up frequency back down to the ground at the down frequency. This is interesting because there has long been talk of "smart" satellites that do more than just this analog bent-pipe work -- say, demodulating the data and switching in the sky. Some LEOs do this (Teledesic), but none of the GEOs do it yet.
Finally, I saw no mention of band. Is this Ku-band (12-14 GHz) or Ka-band (20-30 GHz)? ViaSat is charging forward in the Ka-band market, but there is very very little satellite coverage in that band, so perhaps this is designed to roll out at Ku-band at first with future upgrades to Ka-band possible.
Since when does GSM do 2.4-2.8 kbps voice? AFAIK it does 13 kbps "full-rate" and offers a down-speeded half-rate. The slower rate is most certainly not "fine", although perhaps intelligible and perhaps even recognizable (i.e. you can tell who's talking).
The ITU has standardized on the G.728 (16 kbps) and G.729 (8 kbps) voice compression algorithms, which have been shown to work better than GSM, especially in concatenated situations (i.e. one hop with G.728 compression, another hop with the same or another kind of compression). Plus they have known, bounded CPU requirements.
They ought to be able to do much better given a solid copper pair, 16-bit D/A and A/D, and a 48KHz sampling rate. The Shannon limit for that setup is 48000*16 bits/sec, or 768 Kb/s. That's under optimal conditions
No kidding. You forgot noise.
Just because you slap 16 bit D/A/D gear on the ends of the wire doesn't mean you're going to get 16 bits per symbol through it, sweetie. Hell, why not use 32 bits? 128? The sky's the limit!
Shannon also says that you have to divide in the noise level to figure out how many bits you can get per symbol. THEN you design your D/A/D gear to suit. Dialup PC analog phone modems use 2400 symbols per sec x 14 bits per symbol for 33.6 kbps -- 2400 Hz because of the phone system audio sampling rate and 14 bits/symbols because of the expected noise floor and maximum allowed signal power (FCC limit). 56 kbps cheats the noise floor down a bit but I won't go into that.
Now, *IF* you've got a LEASED LINE that you can dump massive signal power onto (i.e. no other equipment on line), and you've got low inter-symbol interference (ISI - think of it as a time smear of the symbols), then hell yeah you can get 768 kbps. And I'd drive 130 MPH to work if it wasn't for those pesky cops (and curves).
They (Fresh Air) often don't get around to posting today's show details until late in the afternoon, often after the show has already aired in some markets.
Anyway, the URL you supplied will break by tomorrow.
and it was updated to the current state three weeks ago (i.e. this is not news). It's done when it's done. In the meantime, the milestone releases (0.9, 0.9.1 soon) are very very good. Nightly builds are bit more risky but addin/fix/improve features and performance.
Considering the target market, this is a great box
on
AOL And The GPL
·
· Score: 4
The observer.net article slagged the usefulness of the box, so I felt I should say something.
I was one of the first people to buy one of these. I had been waiting since November 1999 for someone to come to market with a net appliance that would work for my mom. ThinkNIC? No. Audrey? No. MSN Companion? Dear God, no. IMac? Sorry, I don't know anything about Mac's, so I wouldn't be able to support her.
I paid $650 for one of these as soon as it came out (it's way cheaper now, see below). The AOL-only factor is actually a positive for me, because it's great for old-lady types like my mom (and probably yours). No porn SPAM, no three hour calls trying to explain to my mom what a VBS script virus is, no Comet-cursor privacy crap.
AOL and Gateway are marketing this as a second terminal for your household, but it works great as the only terminal. Built-in modem.
The whole thing is just really well designed and rock solid. Well, it's rock solid and fully featured now after a few more months of software upgrades. Hell, the thing upgrades itself! Back in March, AOL/Gateway/Midori released an OS upgrade that downloaded itself (24 MB, ugh) and installed itself. She just let it chug for an hour and it was done.
I'm 800 miles away and have better things to do than provide phone support to my mom.
Everyone here is jumping on China, and I'm sure that's an important target, what with 1.2 billion people yearning to breathe free and download porn and whatnot.
But why doesn't anyone seem to notice that Saudi Arabia is one of the most impossibly repressive regimes on the planet? My time spent there was the worst time of my life -- starved for news, starved for entertainment, starved for stimulation, the whole damn country feels like a damn hypnotic state.
Four years ago, a friend was pontificating about East Timor and how the Indonesian occupiers were goin' down, man! (this was about a year before they actually did go down). I mentioned the Saudi situation, and he said "oh, they're going down too".
Still waiting. I would imagine a few people on the inside are waiting too. What really pisses me off is that not only is most of the stuff inside Saudi propanganda, but most of the stuff outside is too.
Slashdot Mirror
- C3L
- TTIME
- SEP
- Ls
Can anyone tell us what those mean? Even just a few words that we can then go google. The body of the article mentioned a few things (like time-of-day orbital plane at Mars) but didn't explicitly correlate those ideas to the variable names.(Score:-1, Troll)
And I'm sure all 131 are A) able to communicate to other calendaring apps, B) compliant with the 3 RFC's, and C) cross platform.
Mod both me and the parent down, please.
There's a huge difference -- Netscape 4.x is a hacked up non-compliant mess that has been on web developers hit list for years.
On the other hand, Mozilla is far more standards compliant than MSIE. Microsoft is inventing an argument to support their anti-competitive actions.
Then, hack it:
We've already got various customization hacks worked out. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to:
Supplies are dwindling. You may want to go ahead and by one (or four) now.
The TX stage is totally designed to talk to the base station, and nobody else. That means it can only push low power (base station has big expensive high gain receive systems to extract signal from noise) and only at the TX frequency band.
Similary, the RX stage is designed to hear from the base station, and nobody else. That means it expects rather high power signals (base station is not running on batteries and can generate huge power if needed) and only at the RX frequency band.
This is the most fundamental part of RF network design -- do the small remote stations (handsets in this case) need to talk directly to each other, or just to a hub station (base in this case) that is equipped with a collosally more expensive array of equipment? THAT decision (and bitrates) drives ALL the remaining design decisions in the RF sections of both the remote and hub.
These kinds of things are fixed in hardware (e.g. capacitors and inductors, filters) and can't just be changed by downloading new firmware.
Try this URL instead:d _fuel_cells/hydrogen_and_fuel_cells.html
http://www.altenergy.org/2/renewables/hydrogen_an
Yeah, white shirt AND white pants? What was he thinking? (and judging from the prodigous gut, it's a he)
I get a "document contains no data" popup error.
Works great in Mozilla. Perhaps his webserver doesn't know what to do with my client ID string? There should be a fallback position.
Dan, please make your website complaint [enough] with standards so that all browsers can at least see the basic text. Thanks.
In applications? Perhaps not.
But in the kernel? Oh jeez, hell yes. They're spanking MS in the kernel. My point is that the kernel (aka what Linus controls) is very proscribed. Linux applications all seem to be pollyanna, but the kernel has got some seriously advanced CS going into it ...
The next big monthly-ish milestone release of Mozilla (0.9.4) is likely to come out in a day or two -- they're working on verification builds today. Also, the recently released Netscape 6.1 is out and also very good (muuuuuuch better than 6.0).
I've been using 0.9.3 for a month now and it's great. Every time I hit a web site that crashed Netscape 4.x or takes forever to layout, I just switch over to Mozilla and it works EVERY TIME. The only reason I still use NS 4.x is that Cookie Pal doesn't support 6.x yet.
Oh, hogwash.
This is precisely the lazy outlook that has been infesting TV journalism (especially on the local level) for years now. "Gee, Biff, now those wacky scientists are saying cholesterol is good for you! Didn't they just say it was bad! Oh pshaw, I'll just ignore it all! Tee hee!"
The serious, respected newspapers of this country (NYT, WP, WSJ, LAT, MH) will always couch these kinds of "latest research" reports in plenty of CONTEXTUAL writing explaining how this fits into the larger body of scientific knowledge. Is this a revolutionary new finding? Has it been corroborated? If it appears to refute earlier results, does it really, or is that not the correct conclusion to draw? All these questions are normally left unanswered in your hometown paper, which is just dumping the press releases straight from the fax machine into the news hole without any actual editorial involvement.
Just keep this in mind as the last of the independent newspapers get bought up by public companies and start to shift to "news you can use" and big color photos.
www.fair.org, dude.
See www.MozillaQuestQuest.com for a parody. I assume he works for Microsoft, the poor guy.
The Mozilla crowd has learned to ignore him; Slashdot should too.
I believe the author is contradicting himself here. A bent-pipe design basically means that there is no onboard processing of the signals -- it just get reflected back down to earth, definitely at a different frequency and perhaps in a slightly different direction, but no demod/remod and switching that would required that computing horsepower.
There is certainly no need for 600 Pentiums in true bent-pipe designs -- satellites have long run on far less computing power than we all have on our desktops. What they do have is gold-plated analog RF technology -- you don't get to service those amplifiers and converters if they fail, so they better Just Work, and for at least 15 years straight.
I am not familiar with the ICO Global network, but this article does nothing to help clarify whether it is or is not a bent-pipe design. I think it probably isn't, but he misunderstands the usage of "bent-pipe" in the satcom industry. Otherwise an excellent job!
Two words: cherry picking.
Because they use Bugzilla to track all issues with Mozilla. Since people complain daily about the symptoms that turn out to be glibc problems, it's best to include the info in the bug report and just point people there.
That's also the place to debate the issue.
There are plenty of "bugs" that aren't, including feature-requests, user error, bad HTML/websites (e.g. the TLS mess), et cetera.
Quote: Mozilla also ships without a JVM, and the first time you try to access a site that needs Java it'll tell you about that and ask if you want to download.
Uh-huh. And right now that mechanism is failing. Try searching Usenet for "Mozilla" and "java" and "previous installation attempt". Mozilla 0.9.2 has problems with the download install.
My point is that pre-installed components work better because the vendor gets to work out all the problems up front, instead of blasting it out to the world for 6.1 billion people to figure out for themselves.
Freedom to innovate indeed.
12.24 km/sec does not equal 7.605936 miles/sec, even if you've got a conversion factor with a gazillion digits. The measurement has the same limited precision (4 digits in this case) no matter what units you use to express it.
Score: 1, Tiresome
See their April press release about it here.
See Boeing's FAQ about it here. The only technical info I saw was that Boeing has "a proprietary solid-state phased array receive and transmit antenna" that they will use, which solves the antenna gain problem.
Based on ViaSat's other [publicly announced] activities, I would expect that the link from the hub (ground) to the remote (aircraft) will be a standard fat DVB carrier, and the return transmitted from the aircraft will be a CDMA / spread spectrum modulation of some sort. ViaSat has some patents on technology that allow them to acheive dramatic savings in bandwidth, which is outrageously expensive on satellites. This returnlink is the real sexy part of the system, the kind of thing that makes engineers want to toil long hours to make it work ...
Further, it's interesting to note that Boeing's FAQ says that the space segment will be "leased satellite transponders". This is the same old "bent pipe" design that has worked well for the past 30 years -- for example, Ku-band is 14 GHz up, 12 GHz down, and all the satellite does is mirror the signals it receives on the up frequency back down to the ground at the down frequency. This is interesting because there has long been talk of "smart" satellites that do more than just this analog bent-pipe work -- say, demodulating the data and switching in the sky. Some LEOs do this (Teledesic), but none of the GEOs do it yet.
Finally, I saw no mention of band. Is this Ku-band (12-14 GHz) or Ka-band (20-30 GHz)? ViaSat is charging forward in the Ka-band market, but there is very very little satellite coverage in that band, so perhaps this is designed to roll out at Ku-band at first with future upgrades to Ka-band possible.
The ITU has standardized on the G.728 (16 kbps) and G.729 (8 kbps) voice compression algorithms, which have been shown to work better than GSM, especially in concatenated situations (i.e. one hop with G.728 compression, another hop with the same or another kind of compression). Plus they have known, bounded CPU requirements.
Tell us more.
Won't somebody please think of the children?!
No kidding. You forgot noise.
Just because you slap 16 bit D/A/D gear on the ends of the wire doesn't mean you're going to get 16 bits per symbol through it, sweetie. Hell, why not use 32 bits? 128? The sky's the limit!
Shannon also says that you have to divide in the noise level to figure out how many bits you can get per symbol. THEN you design your D/A/D gear to suit. Dialup PC analog phone modems use 2400 symbols per sec x 14 bits per symbol for 33.6 kbps -- 2400 Hz because of the phone system audio sampling rate and 14 bits/symbols because of the expected noise floor and maximum allowed signal power (FCC limit). 56 kbps cheats the noise floor down a bit but I won't go into that.
Now, *IF* you've got a LEASED LINE that you can dump massive signal power onto (i.e. no other equipment on line), and you've got low inter-symbol interference (ISI - think of it as a time smear of the symbols), then hell yeah you can get 768 kbps. And I'd drive 130 MPH to work if it wasn't for those pesky cops (and curves).
Anyway, the URL you supplied will break by tomorrow.
This URL should work better.
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
and it was updated to the current state three weeks ago (i.e. this is not news). It's done when it's done. In the meantime, the milestone releases (0.9, 0.9.1 soon) are very very good. Nightly builds are bit more risky but addin/fix/improve features and performance.
I was one of the first people to buy one of these. I had been waiting since November 1999 for someone to come to market with a net appliance that would work for my mom. ThinkNIC? No. Audrey? No. MSN Companion? Dear God, no. IMac? Sorry, I don't know anything about Mac's, so I wouldn't be able to support her.
I paid $650 for one of these as soon as it came out (it's way cheaper now, see below). The AOL-only factor is actually a positive for me, because it's great for old-lady types like my mom (and probably yours). No porn SPAM, no three hour calls trying to explain to my mom what a VBS script virus is, no Comet-cursor privacy crap.
AOL and Gateway are marketing this as a second terminal for your household, but it works great as the only terminal. Built-in modem.
The whole thing is just really well designed and rock solid. Well, it's rock solid and fully featured now after a few more months of software upgrades. Hell, the thing upgrades itself! Back in March, AOL/Gateway/Midori released an OS upgrade that downloaded itself (24 MB, ugh) and installed itself. She just let it chug for an hour and it was done.
I'm 800 miles away and have better things to do than provide phone support to my mom.
My only complaint is that it's a little slow.
And now, if you try hard, you can buy one for $200, and even hack it into a pure linux/windoze box if you're so inclined. Come on in guys, the water's fine.
But why doesn't anyone seem to notice that Saudi Arabia is one of the most impossibly repressive regimes on the planet? My time spent there was the worst time of my life -- starved for news, starved for entertainment, starved for stimulation, the whole damn country feels like a damn hypnotic state.
Four years ago, a friend was pontificating about East Timor and how the Indonesian occupiers were goin' down, man! (this was about a year before they actually did go down). I mentioned the Saudi situation, and he said "oh, they're going down too".
Still waiting. I would imagine a few people on the inside are waiting too. What really pisses me off is that not only is most of the stuff inside Saudi propanganda, but most of the stuff outside is too.