I thought that about debian too. But debian is VERY organized. It's exceptional. The trick is, don't install using the pre-set settings. Install the base system, skip the package settings, exit dselect, and use the apt* tools for everything. it's easy and extremely clean! You end up with a minimal system, no compilers, hardly any utils, but it has apt installed properly. If you haven't used apt.... let me provide an example.
I needed gcc to make a kernel. # apt-get install gcc
one command, and it fetched it and installed it, cleanly.
# apt-get upgrade cleanly upgraded all packages that were out of date on the system.
# apt-cache search string.h - search the package library and tell me what packages contain string.h
# apt-get update - refresh the local cache of the package library.
A long time ago, in the SLS (or was it LSL?) & MCC days (1992?)... a distro was untarring a bunch of files to disk. It was ugly, but adventurous. Slackware was my next stop, and it was a nice change from it's predecessors, a bit more organized. A while after that, RedHat came along. Now, in all my time on #Linux helping people out, I'd always suggest slackware. Not because it was 'better', but because it didn't try to automate anything. IF you wanted to learn Linux, I thought, you better to it the hard way, and tackle slackware. And I think I was right. The only reason I know as much as I do about linux is because of slackware's roughness. The next step, several years later, was using linux in business. Redhat seemed to be growing fast, and there were commercial apps (backup software, etc) that supported redhat. so I went with redhat. It was surprisingly integrated (compared to slackware). I didn't like not knowing what it was doing though.. it did too much for me. It was messy (but rpm was kinda handy). I tried debian, but it was a cluttered mess. Then mandrake (6.1). Ahh.. that was nice. redhat, but cleaned up and integrated. But still redhat...
Then one day, I tried a newer version of Debian, mainly because I like their philosophy. I love it now! It's extremely clean, and the package management rocks.
I've had people tell me 'I don't want package management, I want to compile and do everythign myself all the time'. I don't disagree with these poeple, and if that's what they want to do.. debian holds nothing for them. But after compiling and updating the same things for 8 years, I'm quite happy to let the debian developers take care of the compiling/updating of most things and let apt take care of upgrading. It hasn't failed me yet.
So I guess I'm saying, it all depends on what you want, or what you need. If you already have a very strong grasp of linux, debian is a great tool. If you want to learn it in great detail, use slack. Redhat is messy.
I'm usually a staunch MS hater.. but to be rational, they do make some good products.. they just go too far to corner the market. LOTS of their products are both good and useful, their only drawback being an intnentional difficulty in using non-ms products with them.
So. why am I proud of them? With Windows 2000, MS decided NOT to ship a whole bunch of vendor drivers. With windows, they would say 'we support lots of hwardware... more than our competitors. WIndows is great.' And from a marketing poitn of view, I guess this worked, but from a technical view, it's the manufacturers responsibility to make sure the drivers for their product exist. MS had them convinced that to make your product cool, windows had to support it, so you had to give your driver to MS. Now they've backtracked. Win2k is great (I mean, it's still windows, and it sure doesn't replace unix, but it's the best thing MS has released yet.). Win2k by itself is very stable. Oops. I added the 3dfx drivers, and after a while, while watching some video, it crashed. From what I've seen, it really *IS* the third party drivers that are messing things up (and linux is no different).
If we had the full windows API, ported (OSS or not, though of course OSS is good) to Linux by MS, and the built the 'Lindows' or top of it, or whatever, and had all their apps recompiled... we'd get all the advantages of Windows as a desktop, and all the advantages of Linux as a backend. But this will only work if MS decides to use the power of linux, instead of trying to extend and extinguish it. The windows desktop has to be X compliant, and the control panel has to work on standard init scripts (at least, human readable ones)
The original DNS wasn't designed to do what it is now, not in the manner it's being used. And the TLDs that were picked had good meaning. See, they didn't think of it as all thse businesses existing SOLELY on the web.. it was just a simple way for you to put your real-life network, that augmented a business or whatever, online. If you were a company, you could have ford.com. NOT so you could 'put up a website', but to define computers within ford, for whatever reason. ONE domain for ford. It wasn't a rule, but it was kind of assumed. That's why it's heirarchial! Nowadays, things are different.. domains are used as a primary lookup service for products. Companies see fit to register zillions of domains. I always though it was silly.. but we don't really give them another option, and we allow it to happen.
There is nothing technologically new, or even innovative about napster. It simply gives the average dork an easy way to start sharing mp3 with everyone, and as some have said, takes certain steps to do things for them (like, not actually shutting down when you hit the close button, just minimizing to the systray and continuing to share).
Napster simply does what us geeks have always done, but in a simpler manner. The only ones who this benefits are those who can't cope otherwise. Those of us with a clue, share things with our friends over standard protocols.
Napster is garbage. The code is garbage. The application is garbage. And all the hype is garbage.
It was simply something written at a time when something of this nature would get lots of attention.
That's funny.. from what I've experienced, stock options are about the safest stock-market relatedthing you can do... There is no risk to you, and you only have to buy the stock when you want to sell it!
Well, I believe the point is that they are the SAME BOARD with the SAME COMPONENTS. The only difference is the firmware, and perhaps a transistor that allows you to flash in new firmware.
Yes.. so? Nobody is debating that. When you use a crowbar to break into someone's house, it becomes a burglary tool, and you can be charged with 'posession of burglary tools' Same goes for a blowtorch, a grappling hook, a glass cutter, a radio scanner, etc....
l0phtcrack is totally legal. If it is used to break into a computer illegally, it becomes a tool of the crime.
Yes. Posession of burglary and theft tools is illegal. But a tool does not become a burglary or theft tool until it is used, or it can be proven it was intended to be used, for a burglary or theft. Until that point, it is just a plain old tool.
The technical details are not relevant. 1) He *KNEW* he had no access to the network. It was not open to the public, and he had no permission to use it. He cannot claim it was an 'accident' or 'not obvious' that he wasn't suppoed to be using it. 2) For DECADES now, unauthorized use of a computer system has been EXPLICITLY ILLEGAL. 3) Though theft may not be the right term, and perhaps he should not be charged with 'stealing' the data, especially if he didn't use it for anything, the fact that he copied it, knowing he was not supposed to, should make it very illegal.
What if you broke in to my office building, and used a camera to take pictures of all my documents? Is your posession of those documents leagal? *NO*, you obtained them illegally. The data the boy has are proceeds of crime.
Right. If you have something that you INTEND to, or more often, DO use in the commission of a burglary or theft, then it is considered a burglary/theft tool. Your crowbar, blowtorch, car, glass cutter. Nobody said you can't have them, but you intending to use them, or knowingly giving them to others to use as a tool to comitting a crime is illegal.
Hmm. Well. How many users are there? How much time is wasted? Time *IS* money, and if your IS dept. has to spend a whole frigging day issuing new passwords to EVERYBODY, it isn't going to happen in the day. ANd we can't judge whether this value makes sense if we don't know the burn rate of the company...
Lets' say there are 1000 employees. Let's say that the company cannot operate without the computers running properly, and that in order to change all the passwords, they all must be changed at once. Given that they may have an automated way of changing all the passwords (they may not), and the burn rate for each employee is about $50/hour... an hours downtime costs $50,000.
My god, you guys.. STOP POSTING FALSE MISLEADING HEADLINES!
1) Nothing was DECLARED ILLEGAL 2) Nobody was busted FOR HAVING L0PHTCRACK 3) This is no big deal.
1) people were busted for cracking. 2) One of the charges laid against them was for posession of burglary tools. THIS HAPPENS WITH ANY CRIME! THE TOOLS USED YOU ARE ALSO GUILTY OF POSESSIN!
Ladies and Gentlemen, please realiz that something being considered a 'burglary tool' with regards to a crime is not the same thing as that thing being outlawed.
If you caught breaking in to someone's house, and you happen to have a bag containing a crowbar, grappling hook, climbing harness, glass cutter, and a portable blowtorch, a radio scanner, and a stethoscope, they can accuse you of having 'burglary tools' in your posession, and this adds to the charges against you. These items by themselves are certainly not outlawed, and you can posess them all you want.
Why should computer related crime be any different?
It is good that this type of thing is available, for the same reason OSS is good.. and free information is good. It will not, however, 'undermine' commercial vendors. At least, not those who have products with any value.
In my view, OSS sets a baseline for what is acceptable. Look at sendmail.com. They build management systems around sendmail, and they make money. They add value to sendmail. They do not make their money because they control the ability to send mail.
A standard software practice by MS is the feared embrace, extend, extinguish. Here's a (barely) hypothetical situation. (I'm making this up, but it's probably somewhat true).
MS releases a DNS server, and a nicely integrated management system for administering it. Now, provided it's stable, and follows standards, if the front-end is good enough, it may be beneficial to me to use it. My reason for using it is not because I need DNS service, but because I feel it is easier to manage than my current DNS server. Then, after configuring my whole zillion dollar enterprise to use it, I find out that it uses some kind of proprietary record types.. and there is no way for me to convert back to standard BIND config files. This happens to others, and eventually, if you don't support their version of things, you are out of the market. So, now people use it because they simply need DNS service, and they have nowhere else practical to turn. MS will insist people use the product because of it's superior interface, when really poeple use the product because they no longer have a rational choice.
THIS is the practice that OSS puts a halt to. You make something GOOD? Great.. people will buy it. You try to use the fact that your product is popular to subvert the baseline to control the market? OSS will stop you.
If a bunch of people can get together and make something that really is a contender up against ARM and other chips.... and it costs an arm and a leg to license ARM.. well... perhaps ARM really isn't worth it. On the other hand, if the ARM core is technically and functionally superior.. they have nothing to worry about..
What the fuck are you guys smoking? This isn't news for nerds, it doesn't matter, it's been out for a while, and I certainly do NOT come here to read serial movie reviews.. especially by a professional writer.
Realize this is an issue of conflict between jurisdictions, and not purely one of copyright law.
Under Canadian law, on our Canadian soil, what iCrave is doing is legal. There is some questionability about whether or not they are 'altering' the things they are rebroadcasting, but that was not an issue in this case.
Under U.S. Law, what they are doing is NOT legal.
So, please understand that they were not out to blatantly do something illegal or break the law.. they had every reason to believe they were allowed to do what they did.
The agreement they came to was a) they would not intercept radio TV broadcast from the US and b) They would take more thorough measures to ensure that those watching the shows on iCrave were from Canada *ONLY*, and NOT the U.S.
Realize they can still rebroadcast any radio-TV broadcast that originates on Canadian soil. If those broadcasts happen to include American programming, that's okay... iCrave simply promises not to intercept radio that was BROADCAST FROM the U.S. (which they were doing before, and was somewhat beyond the scope of canadian law.)
The internet is what it is today because people DID NOT file patents for the many unique technolgies/techniques used. IT's a damn good think nobody patented the 'internet provider business model'. Believe me, they could have. What Tim says is good, and well put... that Amazon should not force their 1-click issue, as it goes against the spirit of all the technologies that enabled amazon to do their thing in the first place.
Hmm. Though, a 100Base network can't actually do 100Mbps between hosts. 100Mbps is simply the number of symbls that can be put on the channel. With ethernet overhead, and other protocol overhead, including handshaking, you'll find the maximum throughput for something using tcp is around 85Mbps. And that's if only two hosts are talking.
One can really tell that you didn't read the article. I mean.. you can REALLY tell.... Had you read the article, you would realize what rubbish you are talking. Who said they were running it on the bare metal on the mainframe? Do you know what a mainframe really is? Read the article.. it's VERY good..
Well. That's a tough one. Scientifically, how do you prove that something is harmless?
Here's a few facts though. 2.4Ghz is not ionizing radiation. It can't break down molecular bonds. (This is the chief cause of damage from higher-energy radiation, UV and up...)
2.4Ghz is the frequency (well.. 2.45) that most microwaves ovens run at. They don't mutate your food.. they just warm it up. (Really, that's all they do.. warm it up by vibrating polarized molecules.. chiefly water)
These network cards use in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 milliwats of power. Your cellphone probably uses about 10 times that. Your microwave only cooks things because it uses 6000 times that (600 watts)
If you turned your microwave on, with the door open (if you could) and stood there.. or if you just had a leak,the only thing that would happen is you would heat up. it wouldn't mutate your DNA, it would just increase your body temperature. Granted, if this happened rapidly, or in a focused area, it could be dangerous.... but that's all it does.
And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.
Well... on that note. I use a Lucent 2Mbps 802.11 card on my laptop, and when I got my hands on an 11Mbps version, I slapped it in, and linux gave me two nice positive beeps.. and it seemed to work.. but then it didn't. Couldn't tcpdump, couldn't communicate with the other hosts on the lan.... so perhaps we needa bit of driver tweaking. (I am using the latest wavelan drivers)
The reason the guy mentions having to 'hack' a new antenna is because, by FCC regulations, unlicenced ISM band devices must use a non-standard antenna connector. They do this, on purpose, so that some dumbwit (it's unlicensed.. so there's no guarantee the end user has any clue whatsoever) doesn't hook it up to a linear amplifier, or to his TV, or somethign else, and cause something bad to happen.
And these cards should be able to do the same. There is no reason they wouldn't.
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I thought that about debian too. But debian is VERY organized. It's exceptional.
The trick is, don't install using the pre-set settings. Install the base system, skip the package settings, exit dselect, and use the apt* tools for everything. it's easy and extremely clean!
You end up with a minimal system, no compilers, hardly any utils, but it has apt installed properly.
If you haven't used apt.... let me provide an example.
I needed gcc to make a kernel.
# apt-get install gcc
one command, and it fetched it and installed it, cleanly.
# apt-get upgrade
cleanly upgraded all packages that were out of date on the system.
# apt-cache search string.h
- search the package library and tell me what packages contain string.h
# apt-get update
- refresh the local cache of the package library.
It's wonderful.
A long time ago, in the SLS (or was it LSL?) & MCC days (1992?)... a distro was untarring a bunch of files to disk. It was ugly, but adventurous.
Slackware was my next stop, and it was a nice change from it's predecessors, a bit more organized. A while after that, RedHat came along. Now, in all my time on #Linux helping people out, I'd always suggest slackware. Not because it was 'better', but because it didn't try to automate anything. IF you wanted to learn Linux, I thought, you better to it the hard way, and tackle slackware. And I think I was right. The only reason I know as much as I do about linux is because of slackware's roughness.
The next step, several years later, was using linux in business. Redhat seemed to be growing fast, and there were commercial apps (backup software, etc) that supported redhat. so I went with redhat. It was surprisingly integrated (compared to slackware). I didn't like not knowing what it was doing though.. it did too much for me. It was messy (but rpm was kinda handy).
I tried debian, but it was a cluttered mess.
Then mandrake (6.1). Ahh.. that was nice. redhat, but cleaned up and integrated. But still redhat...
Then one day, I tried a newer version of Debian, mainly because I like their philosophy. I love it now! It's extremely clean, and the package management rocks.
I've had people tell me 'I don't want package management, I want to compile and do everythign myself all the time'. I don't disagree with these poeple, and if that's what they want to do.. debian holds nothing for them. But after compiling and updating the same things for 8 years, I'm quite happy to let the debian developers take care of the compiling/updating of most things and let apt take care of upgrading. It hasn't failed me yet.
So I guess I'm saying, it all depends on what you want, or what you need. If you already have a very strong grasp of linux, debian is a great tool. If you want to learn it in great detail, use slack.
Redhat is messy.
Oh please.
Serial number. Give me a break.
MOST processors have serial numbers... big deal.
SPARC has serial numbers. Why not boycott SUN?
I'm usually a staunch MS hater.. but to be rational, they do make some good products.. they just go too far to corner the market.
LOTS of their products are both good and useful, their only drawback being an intnentional difficulty in using non-ms products with them.
So. why am I proud of them? With Windows 2000, MS decided NOT to ship a whole bunch of vendor drivers.
With windows, they would say 'we support lots of hwardware... more than our competitors. WIndows is great.' And from a marketing poitn of view, I guess this worked, but from a technical view, it's the manufacturers responsibility to make sure the drivers for their product exist. MS had them convinced that to make your product cool, windows had to support it, so you had to give your driver to MS.
Now they've backtracked. Win2k is great (I mean, it's still windows, and it sure doesn't replace unix, but it's the best thing MS has released yet.). Win2k by itself is very stable. Oops. I added the 3dfx drivers, and after a while, while watching some video, it crashed. From what I've seen, it really *IS* the third party drivers that are messing things up (and linux is no different).
If we had the full windows API, ported (OSS or not, though of course OSS is good) to Linux by MS, and the built the 'Lindows' or top of it, or whatever, and had all their apps recompiled... we'd get all the advantages of Windows as a desktop, and all the advantages of Linux as a backend. But this will only work if MS decides to use the power of linux, instead of trying to extend and extinguish it. The windows desktop has to be X compliant, and the control panel has to work on standard init scripts (at least, human readable ones)
The original DNS wasn't designed to do what it is now, not in the manner it's being used. And the TLDs that were picked had good meaning. See, they didn't think of it as all thse businesses existing SOLELY on the web.. it was just a simple way for you to put your real-life network, that augmented a business or whatever, online. If you were a company, you could have ford.com. NOT so you could 'put up a website', but to define computers within ford, for whatever reason. ONE domain for ford. It wasn't a rule, but it was kind of assumed. That's why it's heirarchial! Nowadays, things are different.. domains are used as a primary lookup service for products. Companies see fit to register zillions of domains. I always though it was silly.. but we don't really give them another option, and we allow it to happen.
There is nothing technologically new, or even innovative about napster.
It simply gives the average dork an easy way to start sharing mp3 with everyone, and as some have said, takes certain steps to do things for them (like, not actually shutting down when you hit the close button, just minimizing to the systray and continuing to share).
Napster simply does what us geeks have always done, but in a simpler manner. The only ones who this benefits are those who can't cope otherwise. Those of us with a clue, share things with our friends over standard protocols.
Napster is garbage. The code is garbage. The application is garbage. And all the hype is garbage.
It was simply something written at a time when something of this nature would get lots of attention.
Feh.
That's funny.. from what I've experienced, stock options are about the safest stock-market relatedthing you can do... There is no risk to you, and you only have to buy the stock when you want to sell it!
Well, I believe the point is that they are the SAME BOARD with the SAME COMPONENTS.
The only difference is the firmware, and perhaps a transistor that allows you to flash in new firmware.
Just like USR's old sportster.
Yes.. so? Nobody is debating that.
When you use a crowbar to break into someone's house, it becomes a burglary tool, and you can be charged with 'posession of burglary tools'
Same goes for a blowtorch, a grappling hook, a glass cutter, a radio scanner, etc....
l0phtcrack is totally legal. If it is used to break into a computer illegally, it becomes a tool of the crime.
Yes. Posession of burglary and theft tools is illegal. But a tool does not become a burglary or theft tool until it is used, or it can be proven it was intended to be used, for a burglary or theft. Until that point, it is just a plain old tool.
The technical details are not relevant.
1) He *KNEW* he had no access to the network. It was not open to the public, and he had no permission to use it. He cannot claim it was an 'accident' or 'not obvious' that he wasn't suppoed to be using it.
2) For DECADES now, unauthorized use of a computer system has been EXPLICITLY ILLEGAL.
3) Though theft may not be the right term, and perhaps he should not be charged with 'stealing' the data, especially if he didn't use it for anything, the fact that he copied it, knowing he was not supposed to, should make it very illegal.
What if you broke in to my office building, and used a camera to take pictures of all my documents? Is your posession of those documents leagal? *NO*, you obtained them illegally.
The data the boy has are proceeds of crime.
Right. If you have something that you INTEND to, or more often, DO use in the commission of a burglary or theft, then it is considered a burglary/theft tool.
Your crowbar, blowtorch, car, glass cutter. Nobody said you can't have them, but you intending to use them, or knowingly giving them to others to use as a tool to comitting a crime is illegal.
Hmm. Well. How many users are there? How much time is wasted? Time *IS* money, and if your IS dept. has to spend a whole frigging day issuing new passwords to EVERYBODY, it isn't going to happen in the day. ANd we can't judge whether this value makes sense if we don't know the burn rate of the company...
Lets' say there are 1000 employees. Let's say that the company cannot operate without the computers running properly, and that in order to change all the passwords, they all must be changed at once.
Given that they may have an automated way of changing all the passwords (they may not), and the burn rate for each employee is about $50/hour... an hours downtime costs $50,000.
My god, you guys.. STOP POSTING FALSE MISLEADING HEADLINES!
1) Nothing was DECLARED ILLEGAL
2) Nobody was busted FOR HAVING L0PHTCRACK
3) This is no big deal.
1) people were busted for cracking.
2) One of the charges laid against them was for posession of burglary tools. THIS HAPPENS WITH ANY CRIME! THE TOOLS USED YOU ARE ALSO GUILTY OF POSESSIN!
Jeesus christ... get a grip people.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please realiz that something being considered a 'burglary tool' with regards to a crime is not the same thing as that thing being outlawed.
If you caught breaking in to someone's house, and you happen to have a bag containing a crowbar, grappling hook, climbing harness, glass cutter, and a portable blowtorch, a radio scanner, and a stethoscope, they can accuse you of having 'burglary tools' in your posession, and this adds to the charges against you.
These items by themselves are certainly not outlawed, and you can posess them all you want.
Why should computer related crime be any different?
It is good that this type of thing is available, for the same reason OSS is good.. and free information is good.
It will not, however, 'undermine' commercial vendors. At least, not those who have products with any value.
In my view, OSS sets a baseline for what is acceptable. Look at sendmail.com. They build management systems around sendmail, and they make money. They add value to sendmail. They do not make their money because they control the ability to send mail.
A standard software practice by MS is the feared embrace, extend, extinguish. Here's a (barely) hypothetical situation. (I'm making this up, but it's probably somewhat true).
MS releases a DNS server, and a nicely integrated management system for administering it. Now, provided it's stable, and follows standards, if the front-end is good enough, it may be beneficial to me to use it. My reason for using it is not because I need DNS service, but because I feel it is easier to manage than my current DNS server. Then, after configuring my whole zillion dollar enterprise to use it, I find out that it uses some kind of proprietary record types.. and there is no way for me to convert back to standard BIND config files. This happens to others, and eventually, if you don't support their version of things, you are out of the market.
So, now people use it because they simply need DNS service, and they have nowhere else practical to turn.
MS will insist people use the product because of it's superior interface, when really poeple use the product because they no longer have a rational choice.
THIS is the practice that OSS puts a halt to. You make something GOOD? Great.. people will buy it. You try to use the fact that your product is popular to subvert the baseline to control the market? OSS will stop you.
If a bunch of people can get together and make something that really is a contender up against ARM and other chips.... and it costs an arm and a leg to license ARM.. well... perhaps ARM really isn't worth it. On the other hand, if the ARM core is technically and functionally superior.. they have nothing to worry about..
What the fuck are you guys smoking? This isn't news for nerds, it doesn't matter, it's been out for a while, and I certainly do NOT come here to read serial movie reviews.. especially by a professional writer.
Realize this is an issue of conflict between jurisdictions, and not purely one of copyright law.
Under Canadian law, on our Canadian soil, what iCrave is doing is legal. There is some questionability about whether or not they are 'altering' the things they are rebroadcasting, but that was not an issue in this case.
Under U.S. Law, what they are doing is NOT legal.
So, please understand that they were not out to blatantly do something illegal or break the law.. they had every reason to believe they were allowed to do what they did.
The agreement they came to was
a) they would not intercept radio TV broadcast from the US and
b) They would take more thorough measures to ensure that those watching the shows on iCrave were from Canada *ONLY*, and NOT the U.S.
Realize they can still rebroadcast any radio-TV broadcast that originates on Canadian soil.
If those broadcasts happen to include American programming, that's okay... iCrave simply promises not to intercept radio that was BROADCAST FROM the U.S. (which they were doing before, and was somewhat beyond the scope of canadian law.)
The internet is what it is today because people DID NOT file patents for the many unique technolgies/techniques used. IT's a damn good think nobody patented the 'internet provider business model'. Believe me, they could have. What Tim says is good, and well put... that Amazon should not force their 1-click issue, as it goes against the spirit of all the technologies that enabled amazon to do their thing in the first place.
Hmm.
Though, a 100Base network can't actually do 100Mbps between hosts. 100Mbps is simply the number of symbls that can be put on the channel.
With ethernet overhead, and other protocol overhead, including handshaking, you'll find the maximum throughput for something using tcp is around 85Mbps. And that's if only two hosts are talking.
One can really tell that you didn't read the article. I mean.. you can REALLY tell.... Had you read the article, you would realize what rubbish you are talking. Who said they were running it on the bare metal on the mainframe? Do you know what a mainframe really is? Read the article.. it's VERY good..
Well. That's a tough one. Scientifically, how do you prove that something is harmless?
Here's a few facts though.
2.4Ghz is not ionizing radiation. It can't break down molecular bonds. (This is the chief cause of damage from higher-energy radiation, UV and up...)
2.4Ghz is the frequency (well.. 2.45) that most microwaves ovens run at. They don't mutate your food.. they just warm it up. (Really, that's all they do.. warm it up by vibrating polarized molecules.. chiefly water)
These network cards use in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 milliwats of power. Your cellphone probably uses about 10 times that. Your microwave only cooks things because it uses 6000 times that (600 watts)
If you turned your microwave on, with the door open (if you could) and stood there.. or if you just had a leak,the only thing that would happen is you would heat up. it wouldn't mutate your DNA, it would just increase your body temperature. Granted, if this happened rapidly, or in a focused area, it could be dangerous.... but that's all it does.
And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.
Well... on that note.
I use a Lucent 2Mbps 802.11 card on my laptop, and when I got my hands on an 11Mbps version, I slapped it in, and linux gave me two nice positive beeps.. and it seemed to work.. but then it didn't. Couldn't tcpdump, couldn't communicate with the other hosts on the lan.... so perhaps we needa bit of driver tweaking. (I am using the latest wavelan drivers)
Hey.. it didnt' crash though..
The reason the guy mentions having to 'hack' a new antenna is because, by FCC regulations, unlicenced ISM band devices must use a non-standard antenna connector. They do this, on purpose, so that some dumbwit (it's unlicensed.. so there's no guarantee the end user has any clue whatsoever) doesn't hook it up to a linear amplifier, or to his TV, or somethign else, and cause something bad to happen.
And these cards should be able to do the same. There is no reason they wouldn't.
Well, I can deny it, based on the fact that Bluetooth has dick-all to do with 802.11 and wireless networking.
Bluetooth *IS* slow, and *IS* short range, and that won't change; it's not supposed to and doesn't need to.
And Lucent isn't having any problem maintaining market share. Those 11Mbps cards WAIL!