>Am I required to speak in English? Can I talk with my Navaho friends and relatives in our language? What if I am Private Charlie Whitehorse? You are not required to speak English but you must ID in English. You must also not speak with the intent of obscuring the meaning of your communications.
>However, if one was configured to work within FCC standards, paired with VOIP and a PBX this would be a godsend for a lot of companies and universities that have employees that are far-flung and travel a lot. This was already invented. It was called Motorola iDen. The biggest provider was Nextel. It was widely used by the construction industry for many of the reasons you describe. They got bought by Sprint. Now it will survive only as a "push to talk" checkbox on the cell phone feature list.
There's also a variety of non-networked non-pbx business-band radio stuff. MURS and GMRS, for example, are low entry point services. See more from Motorola.
>If nothing else, shouldn't the FCC be responsible for managing the spectrum in such a way that these kinds of problems do not happen?
They do manage the spectrum. What they don't manage is the receiving devices...
There is a curious problem here caused by the "free market" philosophy taken so to heart by the public at large, the government, and the FCC recently.
The problem is that the TV probably doesn't meet the consumer's needs for keeping out unwanted (and off frequency) RF. The FCC would argue that the manufacturer has sold a TV that doesn't meet the consumer's needs, and the consumer ought not buy it, just like they wouldn't buy one without a remote control or with a volume control button that's in the back and has to be set with a screwdriver. In other words, the TV is not of good engineering design, and the FCC doesn't care -- they think you should care.
So, take the FCC's lead and call the manufacturer of your TV, the person who installed your stereo speakers, etc. and complain to them.
The dual of this is that if you own a device that makes RF noise and someone else complains, your only recourse is to turn your device off. Although you can sometimes hope for FCC intervention, if you want the manufacturer to fix it, you have to go back to them as a consumer. It's only rarely that the FCC goes back to the manufacturer for you, and when they do, it is usually only in an egregious case and with lots of legwork by someone else, and it makes headlines.
The sad thing is that it's much easier to get the FCC involved to tell your hapless neighbors to turn off their broken device than it is to get them to make the manufacturer fix it.
If you buy a washing machine (like mine) that generates noise, you may be stuck with a lot of work to try to get it fixed.
Or, you can write your congressperson and ask that the US adopt stricter EMC (electro-magnetic compitability) requirements such as the European EC requirements.
>I don't know, but I think if one asserts their innocence in a matter, it's up to the government to prove they're not. No, they were not claiming innocence; they were claiming it was their first violation so they ought to get leniency. Unfortunately, (A) it wasn't their first violation as they had been warned before not to use the illegal device and went ahead and did it anyway and (B) what the FCC means is that they have no license of any kind so there's record of past behavior to look back on. They might have had a business radio license, for example, and been operating with it legally for years.
>edxwelch's comment, take 3: There is a standard available (XForms), but no one has yet deployed it. Yes, that's mostly true. It's been published, it's been implemented, but it hasn't been widely depolyed. There are deployments, but widespread deployment will depend on widespread implementation. I'd be satisfied with implementation in Firefox, and move on from there.
> Yes, isn't that what I said? XForms is form related stuff and not specificaly a replacement to XMLHTTPRequest. Somehow we are talking past each other. XMLHTTPRequest loads XML data into an area accessible to JavaScript and other DOM client code in the browser. The XForms instance object is the same thing.
I took a look at the IPod RSS feed example, and it's a bit of a hack. The example has tons of JavaScript in it, and it doesn't actually parse the RSS feed, or at least not much of it. It gets the titles out, but then all it does is use the.innerHTML method to display HTML content that is escaped as CDATA inside the RSS feed. It's not much cleaner than using a frame to do the same thing.
I'll try to write an XForms version of the same thing, that works on the RSS feed from Apple. But I need to wait for a few more features to reach completion in the Mozilla XForms implementation.
>bzzzzt lose 10 points. CSS 2.1 is still only a candidate recommendation, not a recommendation. Give that poster back his 10 points and take 10 away fromn you.
>Actually, I don't think XForms is a replacement for XMLHTTPRequest at all. I read the introduction and it says it's designed as a replacement of HTML forms (as the name implys). XForms provides for loading multiple instances of XML documents (into XPath-accessible DOM trees) from URLs, customized display of the XML using form controls and display widgets, and interaction and update of the data in the XML tree with the widgets, followed by posting of XML data back to the server.
> Okay I stand corrected, there is a standard available... but no one has yet implemented it. Actually, it has been implemented quite widely. There is an implementation about 80% done for Firefox available as a single-click 160kb install with each nightly build, a free plugin from Novell and from x-port.net for Internet Explorer, a complete open-source implementation from Finland, and a plethora of server-side transformations both proprietary and open source, plus a variety of implementations in areas other than desktop browsers.
> Look at your keyboard, it makes sense. Yes, I typed it on my hiptop. Full disclosure: Danger is located in Palo Alto. I don't work for them. They're near Fry's though and I do sometimes go to Fry's.
>The article is one giant piece of astroturf. The submitter's website >plainly lists his address in Palo Alto, which just happens to be >the site of PARC, the Xerox research center that developed the >technology. Coincidence? I seriously doubt it.
Except I don't work for PARC. I do work for Xerox, and Xerox is the sole stockholder in PARC, though PARC is a separate company with its own business deals. I happen to have the privilege of wandering around and finding neat stuff (under non-disclosure), and when it becomes public I can tell other people about it. Jeff mentioned to me in the PARC cafeteria that he'd done this thing, so I posted it, becacuse I thought slashdot readers would be interested.
There's a functional XForms installation available for testing for Mozilla and Firefox. It's a 150 kb single-click installation on top of recent (last week's) Firefox or Mozilla builds.
Plano, Texas (where you live) has one of the largest national dealers of ham equipment, Texas Towers. Why not call them on the phone or drive by their location on Summit Avenue. It's lower energy than EBay and you might strike a local deal.
I tried the Flash demo and the zooming in and out reminds me of a project I worked on at MIT nad later at UCB called Boxer. With Boxer, everything in data and program space is a box, and every object has a place on the screen. You can zoom in and out of boxes for navigation, and create menus by typing in words and putting a box around them. You can share data by naming boxes or create "portals" between boxes (and across networks).
There may also be the unquantifiable effect of reduced electromagnetic emissions on LCD monitors. The exact impact of electromagnetic emissions may not be fully understood, but in general less is considered to better, as addressed in this article.
Electromagnetic emissions are quantifiable, and there are laws about emissions that are harmful to people (for example, high powered ones that might burn you, such as from TV transmitters or microwave ovens) and emissions that interefere with other devices (radios, TVs, speakers, digital electronics, etc.).
The reason to get an LCD, though, is not the imaginary health risks (as opposed to the real risk of being sedentary 8 hours a day), but the effect on radio reception. LCD displays are quieter than CRT's and produce less interference.
So if you're getting a flat TV for your house, get an LCD one instead of a Plasma one if you care about RF. (Or if your neighbors do -- by law, if your TV interferes with their radio, you have to turn yours off.
... the operators of part 15 devices are required to cease operation should harmful interference occur to authorized users of the radiofrequency spectrum...
>I can't see a little mint tin transceiver putting out more than a few hundred mW, and with a tiny antenna at 20 meters, I worked Finland from California with an 8ft antenna and a 4.5W transmitter on 20M recently, and it was no big deal. In a few years, when sunspots start up again, 500mW on 10M will get you Europe with some regularity.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody have RFI / EMC data or experience on the LED light systems that are sold for household use?
>Am I required to speak in English? Can I talk with my Navaho friends and relatives in our language? What if I am Private Charlie Whitehorse?
You are not required to speak English but you must ID in English.
You must also not speak with the intent of obscuring the meaning of your communications.
There's plenty of fun to be had... I talked to the arctic circle and Antarctica using a radio that fits in a waist pack and a few AA batteries.
>However, if one was configured to work within FCC standards, paired with VOIP and a PBX this would be a godsend for a lot of companies and universities that have employees that are far-flung and travel a lot.
This was already invented.
It was called Motorola iDen.
The biggest provider was Nextel.
It was widely used by the construction industry for many of the reasons you describe.
They got bought by Sprint.
Now it will survive only as a "push to talk" checkbox on the cell phone feature list.
There's also a variety of non-networked non-pbx business-band radio stuff. MURS and GMRS, for example, are low entry point services. See more from Motorola.
>If nothing else, shouldn't the FCC be responsible for managing the spectrum in such a way that these kinds of problems do not happen?
They do manage the spectrum. What they don't manage is the receiving devices...
There is a curious problem here caused by the "free market" philosophy taken so to heart by the public at large, the government, and the FCC recently.
The problem is that the TV probably doesn't meet the consumer's needs for keeping out unwanted (and off frequency) RF. The FCC would argue that the manufacturer has sold a TV that doesn't meet the consumer's needs, and the consumer ought not buy it, just like they wouldn't buy one without a remote control or with a volume control button that's in the back and has to be set with a screwdriver. In other words, the TV is not of good engineering design, and the FCC doesn't care -- they think you should care.
So, take the FCC's lead and call the manufacturer of your TV, the person who installed your stereo speakers, etc. and complain to them.
The dual of this is that if you own a device that makes RF noise and someone else complains, your only recourse is to turn your device off. Although you can sometimes hope for FCC intervention, if you want the manufacturer to fix it, you have to go back to them as a consumer. It's only rarely that the FCC goes back to the manufacturer for you, and when they do, it is usually only in an egregious case and with lots of legwork by someone else, and it makes headlines.
The sad thing is that it's much easier to get the FCC involved to tell your hapless neighbors to turn off their broken device than it is to get them to make the manufacturer fix it.
If you buy a washing machine (like mine) that generates noise, you may be stuck with a lot of work to try to get it fixed.
Or, you can write your congressperson and ask that the US adopt stricter EMC (electro-magnetic compitability) requirements such as the European EC requirements.
>I don't know, but I think if one asserts their innocence in a matter, it's up to the government to prove they're not.
No, they were not claiming innocence; they were claiming it was their first violation so they ought to get leniency. Unfortunately, (A) it wasn't their first violation as they had been warned before not to use the illegal device and went ahead and did it anyway and (B) what the FCC means is that they have no license of any kind so there's record of past behavior to look back on. They might have had a business radio license, for example, and been operating with it legally for years.
>edxwelch's comment, take 3: There is a standard available (XForms), but no one has yet deployed it.
Yes, that's mostly true. It's been published, it's been implemented, but it hasn't been widely depolyed. There are deployments, but widespread deployment will depend on widespread implementation. I'd be satisfied with implementation in Firefox, and move on from there.
> Yes, isn't that what I said? XForms is form related stuff and not specificaly a replacement to XMLHTTPRequest.
.innerHTML method to display HTML content that is escaped as CDATA inside the RSS feed. It's not much cleaner than using a frame to do the same thing.
Somehow we are talking past each other. XMLHTTPRequest loads XML data into an area accessible to JavaScript and other DOM client code in the browser. The XForms instance object is the same thing.
I took a look at the IPod RSS feed example, and it's a bit of a hack. The example has tons of JavaScript in it, and it doesn't actually parse the RSS feed, or at least not much of it. It gets the titles out, but then all it does is use the
I'll try to write an XForms version of the same thing, that works on the RSS feed from Apple. But I need to wait for a few more features to reach completion in the Mozilla XForms implementation.
Give that poster back his 10 points and take 10 away fromn you.
According to the CSS2.1 document, page 1:
Note that the editors of the specification are representatives from Opera, Microsoft, and W3C.
>Actually, I don't think XForms is a replacement for XMLHTTPRequest at all. I read the introduction and it says it's designed as a replacement of HTML forms (as the name implys).
XForms provides for loading multiple instances of XML documents (into XPath-accessible DOM trees) from URLs, customized display of the XML using form controls and display widgets, and interaction and update of the data in the XML tree with the widgets, followed by posting of XML data back to the server.
> Okay I stand corrected, there is a standard available... but no one has yet implemented it.
Actually, it has been implemented quite widely. There is an implementation about 80% done for Firefox available as a single-click 160kb install with each nightly build, a free plugin from Novell and from x-port.net for Internet Explorer, a complete open-source implementation from Finland, and a plethora of server-side transformations both proprietary and open source, plus a variety of implementations in areas other than desktop browsers.
> There is none.
Actually, there is. The W3C offering is XForms, which is indeed being implemented in Firefox. Together with CSS, it's quite powerful.
> Look at your keyboard, it makes sense.
Yes, I typed it on my hiptop.
Full disclosure: Danger is located in Palo Alto. I don't work for them. They're near Fry's though and I do sometimes go to Fry's.
>The article is one giant piece of astroturf. The submitter's website
>plainly lists his address in Palo Alto, which just happens to be
>the site of PARC, the Xerox research center that developed the
>technology. Coincidence? I seriously doubt it.
Except I don't work for PARC. I do work for Xerox, and Xerox is the sole stockholder in PARC, though PARC is a separate company with its own business deals. I happen to have the privilege of wandering around and finding neat stuff (under non-disclosure), and when it becomes public I can tell other people about it. Jeff mentioned to me in the PARC cafeteria that he'd done this thing, so I posted it, becacuse I thought slashdot readers would be interested.
Actually it's nice to see an article that's not been taken from the New York Time Circuits section, hi hi.
Here, as previously reported on slashdot by Jeffrey Baker, is the "The ironic shot of the guy about to steal the webcam out of jwz's club.
The Maidenhead Grid Square mechanism has been in use by amateur radio for a long time. It's even supported directly by some Garmin GPS unts. Mine is CM87wk. I have an Emacs Lisp conversion tool though you can find many others at the links above.
There's a functional XForms installation available for testing for Mozilla and Firefox. It's a 150 kb single-click installation on top of recent (last week's) Firefox or Mozilla builds.
Plano, Texas (where you live) has one of the largest national dealers of ham equipment, Texas Towers. Why not call them on the phone or drive by their location on Summit Avenue. It's lower energy than EBay and you might strike a local deal.
AndyDent wrote:
Boxer isn't dead -- it got moved - see http://www.pyxisystems.com/osx.html
That's great! And I see there is a Windows Version as well.
I tried the Flash demo and the zooming in and out reminds me of a project I worked on at MIT nad later at UCB called Boxer. With Boxer, everything in data and program space is a box, and every object has a place on the screen. You can zoom in and out of boxes for navigation, and create menus by typing in words and putting a box around them. You can share data by naming boxes or create "portals" between boxes (and across networks).
Electromagnetic emissions are quantifiable, and there are laws about emissions that are harmful to people (for example, high powered ones that might burn you, such as from TV transmitters or microwave ovens) and emissions that interefere with other devices (radios, TVs, speakers, digital electronics, etc.).
The reason to get an LCD, though, is not the imaginary health risks (as opposed to the real risk of being sedentary 8 hours a day), but the effect on radio reception. LCD displays are quieter than CRT's and produce less interference.
Plasma displays are the worst!
So if you're getting a flat TV for your house, get an LCD one instead of a Plasma one if you care about RF. (Or if your neighbors do -- by law, if your TV interferes with their radio, you have to turn yours off.
See Part 15.15(c):
Here you go:e s/one meterper.html
http://www.wr6wr.com/newSite/articles/featur
Don't forget to put it in the Chrome subdirectory of the profile, not directly in the profile.
>I can't see a little mint tin transceiver putting out more than a few hundred mW, and with a tiny antenna at 20 meters,
I worked Finland from California with an 8ft antenna and a 4.5W transmitter on 20M recently, and it was no big deal. In a few years, when sunspots start up again, 500mW on 10M will get you Europe with some regularity.
You should get your daughter to get a ham license...