That's not just newer microwaves, but ancient ones as well. The device you're speaking of is called, rather descriptively, a "stirrer."
My folks had a microwave made in the middle 70's that was so-equipped.
Other microwave ovens have a revolving glass platter, such as the Panasonic unit in my own kitchen. This simply rotates the item being microwaved, instead of rotating the microwaves.
All microwave ovens (well, at least the ones that cook food properly) have one or the other of these implementations. Properly designed, they behave equally well at distributing the microwave energy evenly across the item being nuked.
In terms of destroying the magnetron, all we care about is the relative orientation of the microwave energy, the item(s) inside (and their possible action as an antenna), and the walls of the unit. Either contraption will introduce sufficient noise to allow your handball analogy to work.
Myself, when I'm microwaving strange things for fun, I just make sure I leave a cup of water in there, with a bit of wood (toothpick, coffee stirrer, popsicle stick, bamboo skewer, etc) in the cup to prevent superheating (and possibly flash-boiling*) the water. This soaks up any radiation not already absorbed by the other item(s) in the microwave by converting it safely to heat.
Also rather boringly and commonly, the hole on the inside of my microwave through which the magnetron aims is covered rather tightly by a sheet of mica. Good luck getting something to arc through that.:)
*: A fun way to surprise the hell out of a friend, and quite possibly burn the shit out of their hands, arms and face is to fill a clean, smooth ceramic mug with water and microwave it until it is at a good boil. Then, stop the microwave, let the water stop boiling, and turn it back on for a minute or so. Then just ask your "friend" to remove the cup.
Perhaps the "sad times we live in" have merely persisted since the "good ol' days" -- GP's statement didn't rule that possibility out. Assuming otherwise is non sequitur, at best.
So, it seems to me that you kids might actually be in agreement with each other...and that one of you has some comprehension issues.
We use Cellebrite gear at work to do phonebook transfers between phones.
The stuff is alarmingly good at what it does, and is simple to connect. One just selects the type of phone from an hierarchical on-screen menu, and it then tells you which cable to use (they're quite handily coded and labeled). Plug it in, push go button, wait a bit, and done.
The main problem we have with them is with phones that have crufty data connectors.
I have no doubt that an officer would find it very easy to use with minimal (or perhaps no) training.
I must now learn how, exactly, the device works and figure out how to keep it from inspecting my Droid. (I don't have anything to hide, but I do sometimes travel to Michigan and I just prefer my private stuff to remain private.)
I'm still trying to get over the continuous repetition of the sound "K?"
Somehow I think I'd be happier if Penn Jillette were yelling "FUCK!" instead of this guy saying "K?" over and over and over and over and over and over.
Anyone who has watched this any even minor portion of this lecture would understand.
Download more than about 3Gb in the evening (between 4pm and midnight) and your connection speed gets cut by 75%. So the 30 becomes about 6 or 7mbit.
That almost sounds reasonable....as long as I can transfer way, way more than that between midnight and 4PM: I'd be almost OK with swamping my connection for at most 16 hours a day, if it meant not having a 250GB/month cap.
I'm deviant enough that I'm not afraid to say this:
Back in the late 80's or the early 90's, I was at my grandma's house for a day or two. I took a shower.
Hanging in that shower was a well-laminated breast self-exam instructional card.
I found it very arousing, though at the time I plainly wouldn't have known what to do with a naked and willing girl even if I did have one. I was maybe 9 or 10, and mostly I just knew that looking at tits made my cock get hard and my head feel strange.
Virtual PC is the back end of Vista/7's "XP Mode." I doubt that this integration is the product of their gaming division....
That said, you're right: There's plenty of old hardware that still works just fine. I don't currently see any reason to replace my 7 year old Dell laptop, as it's paltry 1.83GHz Pentium M is still well beyond adequate for the stuff that I need a portable computer for, and its barely-supported ATI x300 runs Windows 7 (with eye candy) just fine. It's stable, and it works. (And its 1920x1200 15.4" display is still rather awesome to use...)
It doesn't play new games anymore, but I gave up on laptop gaming forever about a year after I got that machine...and lately I find myself with a PSP and an iPod Touch and a Droid, so I don't care. (If I'm going on a trip and want entertainment, I'm likely to become bored with playing video games in general long before I become bored with the choices I have available to me.)
That said, it is likely that Windows 8 will be 64-bit only, which might mean that software will increasingly become 64-bit, and so the old laptop may finally get replaced sometime around then. Which means that MS will get another OEM license sale by default, from me.
For a company that gives away several gigabytes of email storage for free to anyone who bothers to sign up, who also keeps several copies in RAM of any document which they can manage to crawl across on Teh Intarwebs, and who is busily trying to photograph every city street and make the results available for free, I really don't think that the amount of space consumed by Google Video is really significant in any meaningful way.
Bad example. You ears are made to recognize time differences between left and right. Overall latency is much less annoying.
Good example. It lets me hear things as I might if I were a musician, playing with someone else. Perhaps you're not familiar enough with the Beatles to understand why I chose them for this listening experiment: Much of their earlier music has instruments and vocals panned either hard left or hard right, with little or nothing centered at all. It's the closest thing to a raw multitrack that I felt like rounding up, early on a Friday morning.
100ms of end to end would be about the amount of delay where conversing would stop being funny. Why you want end to end to end is beyond me though. Trying out echo suppression maybe?
Because that's how it works:
1. Kick drum hit in Chicago, heard locally by the drummer doing the drumming with zero latency 2. 50ms of delay as the bits go across a couple of states 3. A bass note is played in Cleveland, played perfectly in time (as far as that particular musician can hear, locally, at zero latency) 4. 50ms of delay as the results go back 5. Drummer in Chicago hears bass note 100ms after his down beat. 6. Drummer hates this. Goes and finds a different set of folks to play with who have lower latency -- preferably in the same room.
It's just a number. It could be lower, it could be higher. My own 12/1.5 VDSL seems to have round-trip latency of less than about 30ms for most places east of the Mississippi, but things were far higher when I had cable.
The Wii already supports 480p. This is twice as good as NTSC's standard 480i. It, therefore, is high-definition. (In fact, it is higher-definition than most of the over-the-air ATSC signals that I can receive with my HDTV, which are largely 4x3 480i)
As if WoW is the most latency-sensitive thing in the world. (It's not.)
Free WiFi audio/video telephony: Ekiga...
Ok, sure. It doesn't improve my life at all (with the stated constraints about what I think I should care about), but why not. I guess it does this one thing that folks have already been doing, and has a chance at sounding better in the process.
(I can't be disagreeable all the time, and hey, at least I learned about new unpronounceable open-source widget thanks to your suggestion, which I guess should be worth some credit...)
Radio Amateur digital voice over satellite.
Can HAMs working amateur satellites actually manage to reliably stuff 64Kbps through that pipe consistently enough to make it useful for realtime voice communications?
Oh, and the latency...chopping off a few tens-of-milliseconds of latency, which is the best part about this new codec, is pretty well meaningless when working with the RTT of a geosync satellite.
We've already got codecs that provide good voice audio, at far lower bandwidth than this.
Digital voice over HF radio.
No, not at all. There are other codecs which use less bandwidth and provide intelligible voice audio. This one is supposed to be better because it sounds good and has low latency, not because it's particularly efficient of bandwidth. Digital audio over HF is neat, but this isn't the right approach. AMBE might be a good choice for voice audio if it weren't so monetarily expensive.
GSM would be better for HF, and (IIRC) it is free to use, but even that seems rather impractical for those sorts of miniscule data rates.
Digital voice over any existing data channel that is already 'full'.
If it's already 'full', then circuit latency and packet loss will be already be a bitch that is better subdued using stuff we've already got. Opus's current claim to fame is that it sounds good and has low latency on good networks, not that it survives broken/overburdened networks (where the latency improvement will be swamped by that of the network itself).
Digital voice chat and telephony over a LAN, without clogging up the network.
Show me a modern LAN segment which is alleged to be clogged by voice chat and telephony, and I'll show you both a network admin who just lost his job AND the new BMW M3 that I bought with my new-found fortune. (I'll even let you give it a spin for a few days -- consider it a finder's fee.)
What I find most amusing is the female handler in the background, trying in vain to steer the interview:
"I'm sorry Roy that's not ** I mean we're really up on time. Was there more questions you want to ask?"
**: Indecipherable
I couldn't pick out what she said the next time she spoke up. Probably in part because I'm unused to a female British accent, and also because none of this is sufficiently amusing for me to try very hard to filter out the voice of the RIM dude.
I did mess with it a bit in Audition, which helped a bit with the first passage, but again I didn't put effort much into it. (Un-massaged, it'll take a fair bit of volume to get her up to plainly-audible levels in the average computer room, for those interested in hearing her for themselves.)
I'm mostly lead wonder if the handler is with the BBC, RIM, or perhaps another agency, and whether she's so interjective in the rest of the interview (which I guess won't be available until later this month).
And to think that for all this time, I've been giving guitarists two choices: Either plug in with a real wire, or prepare to be strangled with that cheap-shit wireless kit.
Sometimes they plug in, and other times the show gets delayed while we hunt around looking for enough air to blow up a backup guitar player. (It's their head that's the problem -- it takes forever to inflate it to the correct size.)
Perhaps this new codec will help save a guitarist.
I think my point was more that it is currently seldom worth using a new codec, since the folks in the middle are using old codecs. And when I say old, I mean it: Many decades old, in some cases.
I can feed pristine 96KHz 24-bit audio into the PSTN, and still will never get anything better than g.711 out of the other end, because it gets ruined in the middle.
So, it's something that might be useful for musicians. Maybe.
100ms of total, round-trip, end-to-end-to-end latency (remember to count both hypothetical DSL connections) is the same as two musicians trying to play together when they are about 56 feet apart. It might be practical, but it doesn't sound very fun for many types of informal "jam"-oriented music: There's a reason the bass player often stands next to the drummer, and it's usually not because he wants more hearing damage.
I just listened to some Beatles (just because of their typical hard-panned stereo separation) with the left channel delayed by 100ms, and found it to be fairly bothersome.
If I were playing bass with that sort of delay, I'd expect either myself or the drummer to become very annoyed very quickly.
Who cares what codec is being used for my VoIP phone at home or on my desk, when anyone I call is still most likely to be connected over the PSTN with g.711 or g.723, or (far worse) a cell phone?
And don't get me wrong: I want to care; I really do. And maybe I did care, at one point. I was going to build an Asterisk system for home -- I even collected some of the hardware to make it work.
But I stopped caring when the boy got old enough to properly want a cell phone, the wife got a cell phone, and I had a cell phone. After that, I dropped the home phone line altogether, since it was just a waste of money.
I have no interest, at this moment, in having any sort of telephony tied to my premises.
And while I could, I suppose, run some manner of VoIP client on my Droid over cellular, I think that's a complete non-starter at the moment: I had trouble earlier today getting a 64kbps MP3 to stream correctly over 3G Verizon (even though I controlled both ends of the stream), but that was just an inconvenience.
It'd be a lot more than simply inconvenient if my phone calls were that spotty. I don't care how good it sounds if it doesn't work.
Is there any good and practical use for this new codec?
Everyone and their brother replied to you to remind you about the existence of femptocells and small/cheap repeaters and such, but those don't work all that hot in a large building that actively eats RF or have lots of users.
Fortunately, there's other solutions that actually work and actually scale. (Fiber backhaul for in-building wireless? You betcha.)
(It's always amusing to me that Slashdot will, on one hand, recommend the fanciest and best networking kit imaginable, and then with the other hand suggest the shittiest and worst-performing RF stuff available.)
A house with the original 1950's windows still in place is the same as buying a car with bald tires that are showing the belts.
Normally I agree with you... but bald tires can kill you dead, while old windows just slowly drain your pocketbook.:)
It's more like driving a car with 200,000 miles on the ignition system, with the original coil(s), wires, and plugs. It might still seem to run OK, but it's going to dig a hole in your wallet with fuel usage.
Ironic and now completely off-topic footnote: As I write this, I'm listening to the sash rattle in the wind in the 100+-year-old window beside me...BUT I keep my fleet of old cars running in top form. Priorities, I guess.;)
AFAICT, a Faraday cage doesn't need to be grounded in order to be effective. It just has to surround the thing, and be conductive at whatever the frequency in question is. It doesn't have to be a particular shape. (It might make sense that it must be at least half a wavelength long in any dimension, but that's a foregone conclusion on house-sized scale and cellphone/WiFi frequencies.)
Quoth Wikipedia: "A Faraday cage's operation depends on the fact that an external static electrical field will cause the electrical charges within the cage's conducting material to redistribute themselves so as to cancel the field's effects in the cage's interior."
Anecdotal supporting evidence: I used to use a small vinyl pouch lined with funny-looking RF-shielding fabric to hide my phone when the boss was irrevocably tracking me with GPS. It worked fine at blocking GPS, worked fine at blocking phone calls, and also did a good job blocking Bluetooth. It also worked fine at killing the battery life as the phone tried really, really hard to communicate with a tower. I got it at Dealextreme. It was cheap. It was not grounded.
It also had a separate pocket wherein the phone was not surrounded by the conductive fabric, but only covered on one side. The phone and GPS worked fine when in this orientation.
As to connecting the router to the house: It's unlikely to destroy anything in and of itself with a common low-power device, but it's also unlikely to work very well for all of the same reasons that a Faraday cage does work to begin with. You'd have better luck with a 1/4-wave coathanger for an antenna.
And if the house/Faraday cage built up a static charge due to being completely isolated from ground, it might eventually discharge across your router. Which would make you sad. (In practice, it'll be slightly grounded anyway, whether intentional or not: the studs are slightly conductive, the sheathing is conductive, the fasteners are very conductive, and reinforced concrete foundations are surprisingly conductive.)
Metal lath (not "lathe") is fairly common wherever there's semi-old-school plaster.
It gets tacked to the studs (whatever those studs might consist of), and then plaster (not sheetrock) is applied in semi-liquid form. After that, it's painted or whatever.
I've got a lot of it in my house. It might be the cause of some dead spots I used to have with Wifi, but I haven't exactly made a study of it (it was simplest to just add another access point and consider the problem solved).
You probably know this.
As to OP's comment about using "metal mesh lathe" (sic) over top of metal studs "before you even get to think about putting sheetrock on," I have no idea WTF he's going on about. I've been involved with my share of construction (new, remod, residential, commercial, whatever), and I've never seen anything like that.
The only time I've seen a layer of metal inside of a wall was when I was working in an x-ray room (and yes, it was very well-shielded indeed).
Such half-witted AC replies as this are making me consider filtering my inbox to avoid notification of them. There's no point in reading them, and there's no point in replying to them, so...
Slashdot Mirror
That's not just newer microwaves, but ancient ones as well. The device you're speaking of is called, rather descriptively, a "stirrer."
My folks had a microwave made in the middle 70's that was so-equipped.
Other microwave ovens have a revolving glass platter, such as the Panasonic unit in my own kitchen. This simply rotates the item being microwaved, instead of rotating the microwaves.
All microwave ovens (well, at least the ones that cook food properly) have one or the other of these implementations. Properly designed, they behave equally well at distributing the microwave energy evenly across the item being nuked.
In terms of destroying the magnetron, all we care about is the relative orientation of the microwave energy, the item(s) inside (and their possible action as an antenna), and the walls of the unit. Either contraption will introduce sufficient noise to allow your handball analogy to work.
Myself, when I'm microwaving strange things for fun, I just make sure I leave a cup of water in there, with a bit of wood (toothpick, coffee stirrer, popsicle stick, bamboo skewer, etc) in the cup to prevent superheating (and possibly flash-boiling*) the water. This soaks up any radiation not already absorbed by the other item(s) in the microwave by converting it safely to heat.
Also rather boringly and commonly, the hole on the inside of my microwave through which the magnetron aims is covered rather tightly by a sheet of mica. Good luck getting something to arc through that. :)
*: A fun way to surprise the hell out of a friend, and quite possibly burn the shit out of their hands, arms and face is to fill a clean, smooth ceramic mug with water and microwave it until it is at a good boil. Then, stop the microwave, let the water stop boiling, and turn it back on for a minute or so. Then just ask your "friend" to remove the cup.
Perhaps the "sad times we live in" have merely persisted since the "good ol' days" -- GP's statement didn't rule that possibility out. Assuming otherwise is non sequitur, at best.
So, it seems to me that you kids might actually be in agreement with each other...and that one of you has some comprehension issues.
We use Cellebrite gear at work to do phonebook transfers between phones.
The stuff is alarmingly good at what it does, and is simple to connect. One just selects the type of phone from an hierarchical on-screen menu, and it then tells you which cable to use (they're quite handily coded and labeled). Plug it in, push go button, wait a bit, and done.
The main problem we have with them is with phones that have crufty data connectors.
I have no doubt that an officer would find it very easy to use with minimal (or perhaps no) training.
I must now learn how, exactly, the device works and figure out how to keep it from inspecting my Droid. (I don't have anything to hide, but I do sometimes travel to Michigan and I just prefer my private stuff to remain private.)
I'm watching it now.
I'm still trying to get over the continuous repetition of the sound "K?"
Somehow I think I'd be happier if Penn Jillette were yelling "FUCK!" instead of this guy saying "K?" over and over and over and over and over and over.
Anyone who has watched this any even minor portion of this lecture would understand.
That almost sounds reasonable....as long as I can transfer way, way more than that between midnight and 4PM: I'd be almost OK with swamping my connection for at most 16 hours a day, if it meant not having a 250GB/month cap.
Is this the case?
I'm deviant enough that I'm not afraid to say this:
Back in the late 80's or the early 90's, I was at my grandma's house for a day or two. I took a shower.
Hanging in that shower was a well-laminated breast self-exam instructional card.
I found it very arousing, though at the time I plainly wouldn't have known what to do with a naked and willing girl even if I did have one. I was maybe 9 or 10, and mostly I just knew that looking at tits made my cock get hard and my head feel strange.
Was it pornography?
Virtual PC is the back end of Vista/7's "XP Mode." I doubt that this integration is the product of their gaming division....
That said, you're right: There's plenty of old hardware that still works just fine. I don't currently see any reason to replace my 7 year old Dell laptop, as it's paltry 1.83GHz Pentium M is still well beyond adequate for the stuff that I need a portable computer for, and its barely-supported ATI x300 runs Windows 7 (with eye candy) just fine. It's stable, and it works. (And its 1920x1200 15.4" display is still rather awesome to use...)
It doesn't play new games anymore, but I gave up on laptop gaming forever about a year after I got that machine...and lately I find myself with a PSP and an iPod Touch and a Droid, so I don't care. (If I'm going on a trip and want entertainment, I'm likely to become bored with playing video games in general long before I become bored with the choices I have available to me.)
That said, it is likely that Windows 8 will be 64-bit only, which might mean that software will increasingly become 64-bit, and so the old laptop may finally get replaced sometime around then. Which means that MS will get another OEM license sale by default, from me.
For a company that gives away several gigabytes of email storage for free to anyone who bothers to sign up, who also keeps several copies in RAM of any document which they can manage to crawl across on Teh Intarwebs, and who is busily trying to photograph every city street and make the results available for free, I really don't think that the amount of space consumed by Google Video is really significant in any meaningful way.
Just a guess, of course.
UMSDOS.
Is this a trick question?
Bad example. You ears are made to recognize time differences between left and right. Overall latency is much less annoying.
Good example. It lets me hear things as I might if I were a musician, playing with someone else. Perhaps you're not familiar enough with the Beatles to understand why I chose them for this listening experiment: Much of their earlier music has instruments and vocals panned either hard left or hard right, with little or nothing centered at all. It's the closest thing to a raw multitrack that I felt like rounding up, early on a Friday morning.
100ms of end to end would be about the amount of delay where conversing would stop being funny. Why you want end to end to end is beyond me though. Trying out echo suppression maybe?
Because that's how it works:
1. Kick drum hit in Chicago, heard locally by the drummer doing the drumming with zero latency
2. 50ms of delay as the bits go across a couple of states
3. A bass note is played in Cleveland, played perfectly in time (as far as that particular musician can hear, locally, at zero latency)
4. 50ms of delay as the results go back
5. Drummer in Chicago hears bass note 100ms after his down beat.
6. Drummer hates this. Goes and finds a different set of folks to play with who have lower latency -- preferably in the same room.
It's just a number. It could be lower, it could be higher. My own 12/1.5 VDSL seems to have round-trip latency of less than about 30ms for most places east of the Mississippi, but things were far higher when I had cable.
Pedantic, but:
The Wii already supports 480p. This is twice as good as NTSC's standard 480i. It, therefore, is high-definition. (In fact, it is higher-definition than most of the over-the-air ATSC signals that I can receive with my HDTV, which are largely 4x3 480i)
Massive online game chat: WoW, Mumble/Murmur...
As if WoW is the most latency-sensitive thing in the world. (It's not.)
Free WiFi audio/video telephony: Ekiga...
Ok, sure. It doesn't improve my life at all (with the stated constraints about what I think I should care about), but why not. I guess it does this one thing that folks have already been doing, and has a chance at sounding better in the process.
(I can't be disagreeable all the time, and hey, at least I learned about new unpronounceable open-source widget thanks to your suggestion, which I guess should be worth some credit...)
Radio Amateur digital voice over satellite.
Can HAMs working amateur satellites actually manage to reliably stuff 64Kbps through that pipe consistently enough to make it useful for realtime voice communications?
Oh, and the latency...chopping off a few tens-of-milliseconds of latency, which is the best part about this new codec, is pretty well meaningless when working with the RTT of a geosync satellite.
We've already got codecs that provide good voice audio, at far lower bandwidth than this.
Digital voice over HF radio.
No, not at all. There are other codecs which use less bandwidth and provide intelligible voice audio. This one is supposed to be better because it sounds good and has low latency, not because it's particularly efficient of bandwidth. Digital audio over HF is neat, but this isn't the right approach. AMBE might be a good choice for voice audio if it weren't so monetarily expensive.
GSM would be better for HF, and (IIRC) it is free to use, but even that seems rather impractical for those sorts of miniscule data rates.
Digital voice over any existing data channel that is already 'full'.
If it's already 'full', then circuit latency and packet loss will be already be a bitch that is better subdued using stuff we've already got. Opus's current claim to fame is that it sounds good and has low latency on good networks, not that it survives broken/overburdened networks (where the latency improvement will be swamped by that of the network itself).
Digital voice chat and telephony over a LAN, without clogging up the network.
Show me a modern LAN segment which is alleged to be clogged by voice chat and telephony, and I'll show you both a network admin who just lost his job AND the new BMW M3 that I bought with my new-found fortune. (I'll even let you give it a spin for a few days -- consider it a finder's fee.)
What I find most amusing is the female handler in the background, trying in vain to steer the interview:
"I'm sorry Roy that's not ** I mean we're really up on time. Was there more questions you want to ask?"
**: Indecipherable
I couldn't pick out what she said the next time she spoke up. Probably in part because I'm unused to a female British accent, and also because none of this is sufficiently amusing for me to try very hard to filter out the voice of the RIM dude.
I did mess with it a bit in Audition, which helped a bit with the first passage, but again I didn't put effort much into it. (Un-massaged, it'll take a fair bit of volume to get her up to plainly-audible levels in the average computer room, for those interested in hearing her for themselves.)
I'm mostly lead wonder if the handler is with the BBC, RIM, or perhaps another agency, and whether she's so interjective in the rest of the interview (which I guess won't be available until later this month).
Dual-Tongued Female Mutants
Forget Wikipedia. I'm registering dtfm.xxx.
Good example.
And to think that for all this time, I've been giving guitarists two choices: Either plug in with a real wire, or prepare to be strangled with that cheap-shit wireless kit.
Sometimes they plug in, and other times the show gets delayed while we hunt around looking for enough air to blow up a backup guitar player. (It's their head that's the problem -- it takes forever to inflate it to the correct size.)
Perhaps this new codec will help save a guitarist.
I think my point was more that it is currently seldom worth using a new codec, since the folks in the middle are using old codecs. And when I say old, I mean it: Many decades old, in some cases.
I can feed pristine 96KHz 24-bit audio into the PSTN, and still will never get anything better than g.711 out of the other end, because it gets ruined in the middle.
So, it's something that might be useful for musicians. Maybe.
100ms of total, round-trip, end-to-end-to-end latency (remember to count both hypothetical DSL connections) is the same as two musicians trying to play together when they are about 56 feet apart. It might be practical, but it doesn't sound very fun for many types of informal "jam"-oriented music: There's a reason the bass player often stands next to the drummer, and it's usually not because he wants more hearing damage.
I just listened to some Beatles (just because of their typical hard-panned stereo separation) with the left channel delayed by 100ms, and found it to be fairly bothersome.
If I were playing bass with that sort of delay, I'd expect either myself or the drummer to become very annoyed very quickly.
But at least you answered my question. :)
Thanks.
Who cares what codec is being used for my VoIP phone at home or on my desk, when anyone I call is still most likely to be connected over the PSTN with g.711 or g.723, or (far worse) a cell phone?
And don't get me wrong: I want to care; I really do. And maybe I did care, at one point. I was going to build an Asterisk system for home -- I even collected some of the hardware to make it work.
But I stopped caring when the boy got old enough to properly want a cell phone, the wife got a cell phone, and I had a cell phone. After that, I dropped the home phone line altogether, since it was just a waste of money.
I have no interest, at this moment, in having any sort of telephony tied to my premises.
And while I could, I suppose, run some manner of VoIP client on my Droid over cellular, I think that's a complete non-starter at the moment: I had trouble earlier today getting a 64kbps MP3 to stream correctly over 3G Verizon (even though I controlled both ends of the stream), but that was just an inconvenience.
It'd be a lot more than simply inconvenient if my phone calls were that spotty. I don't care how good it sounds if it doesn't work.
Is there any good and practical use for this new codec?
I find your numbers to be wacky and useless.
Are you, perchance, not in the US?
Everyone and their brother replied to you to remind you about the existence of femptocells and small/cheap repeaters and such, but those don't work all that hot in a large building that actively eats RF or have lots of users.
Fortunately, there's other solutions that actually work and actually scale. (Fiber backhaul for in-building wireless? You betcha.)
There's other examples, too.
(It's always amusing to me that Slashdot will, on one hand, recommend the fanciest and best networking kit imaginable, and then with the other hand suggest the shittiest and worst-performing RF stuff available.)
A house with the original 1950's windows still in place is the same as buying a car with bald tires that are showing the belts.
Normally I agree with you... but bald tires can kill you dead, while old windows just slowly drain your pocketbook. :)
It's more like driving a car with 200,000 miles on the ignition system, with the original coil(s), wires, and plugs. It might still seem to run OK, but it's going to dig a hole in your wallet with fuel usage.
Ironic and now completely off-topic footnote: As I write this, I'm listening to the sash rattle in the wind in the 100+-year-old window beside me...BUT I keep my fleet of old cars running in top form. Priorities, I guess. ;)
AFAICT, a Faraday cage doesn't need to be grounded in order to be effective. It just has to surround the thing, and be conductive at whatever the frequency in question is. It doesn't have to be a particular shape. (It might make sense that it must be at least half a wavelength long in any dimension, but that's a foregone conclusion on house-sized scale and cellphone/WiFi frequencies.)
Quoth Wikipedia: "A Faraday cage's operation depends on the fact that an external static electrical field will cause the electrical charges within the cage's conducting material to redistribute themselves so as to cancel the field's effects in the cage's interior."
Anecdotal supporting evidence: I used to use a small vinyl pouch lined with funny-looking RF-shielding fabric to hide my phone when the boss was irrevocably tracking me with GPS. It worked fine at blocking GPS, worked fine at blocking phone calls, and also did a good job blocking Bluetooth. It also worked fine at killing the battery life as the phone tried really, really hard to communicate with a tower. I got it at Dealextreme. It was cheap. It was not grounded.
It also had a separate pocket wherein the phone was not surrounded by the conductive fabric, but only covered on one side. The phone and GPS worked fine when in this orientation.
As to connecting the router to the house: It's unlikely to destroy anything in and of itself with a common low-power device, but it's also unlikely to work very well for all of the same reasons that a Faraday cage does work to begin with. You'd have better luck with a 1/4-wave coathanger for an antenna.
And if the house/Faraday cage built up a static charge due to being completely isolated from ground, it might eventually discharge across your router. Which would make you sad. (In practice, it'll be slightly grounded anyway, whether intentional or not: the studs are slightly conductive, the sheathing is conductive, the fasteners are very conductive, and reinforced concrete foundations are surprisingly conductive.)
Metal lath (not "lathe") is fairly common wherever there's semi-old-school plaster.
It gets tacked to the studs (whatever those studs might consist of), and then plaster (not sheetrock) is applied in semi-liquid form. After that, it's painted or whatever.
I've got a lot of it in my house. It might be the cause of some dead spots I used to have with Wifi, but I haven't exactly made a study of it (it was simplest to just add another access point and consider the problem solved).
You probably know this.
As to OP's comment about using "metal mesh lathe" (sic) over top of metal studs "before you even get to think about putting sheetrock on," I have no idea WTF he's going on about. I've been involved with my share of construction (new, remod, residential, commercial, whatever), and I've never seen anything like that.
The only time I've seen a layer of metal inside of a wall was when I was working in an x-ray room (and yes, it was very well-shielded indeed).
la la la
*thumbs in ears*
Such half-witted AC replies as this are making me consider filtering my inbox to avoid notification of them. There's no point in reading them, and there's no point in replying to them, so...
*yawn*