Okay, good point. I shouldn't say that its not possible to emit RF within that package, but it certainly becomes less efficient and less practical. Range, sensitivity and power efficiency will suffer.
Less efficient and practical compared to what? An 802.11 radio+antenna which doesn't fit into a SIM card?
I agree -- it's not practical. Just look around: there's nootherproducts that manage to shrink an antenna down in size, and still operate at 2.4GHz, are there?
Given the severe lack of anyone doing stuff like this, it must be impossible to use an antenna shorter than a quarter-wavelength for anything, ever. I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?
I have used this inexpensive pouch to keep my cell phone from working*, without the hassle of turning it off and back on. It worked fine**. The pouch has two compartments within it, one within the Faraday cage, and one outside of it, so you could use it as a normal cell-phone holder the rest of the time if you wanted to.
*: My employer had tracking software installed on my company phone, and while I was generally OK with that during my day, I was most most certainly NOT OK with it tracking me on my days off, or when I was on lunch. The software was able to remote-start if the server-side decided that it should be on, so exiting the app wouldn't work -- it'd just come right back after a bit. And, besides, it'd log every time the app stopped and started, and when the phone would boot. Rebooting, therefore, wasn't much of an option either, as there'd be a record for at least every time the phone turned on.
**: I had access to the website where the tracking information went. When the phone was in the bag, it had no idea what I was up to.
Again: My posting was not argumentative. It was a sarcastic parody. I don't care if you, or anyone else thought it was funny -- I felt that it was, so I posted it.
But even if it were some thinly-veiled attempt at starting a broad discussion of opinion and politics: Replacing "needs" with "expenditures" is ambiguous. It only insinuates that the military's need for money may not match the amount that they receive. It could imply that I think the military is overfunded, as you seem to assume, or it could imply that I think it is underfunded.
But I really didn't put that much thought into it.
The truth is that I believe that the military is perhaps woefully underfunded, and that our troops deserve better tools and more livable paychecks for their duties. I recognize that money doesn't fall from the heavens, and that someone (aka "me") must pay for that.
But hey, as long as you're still making assumptions about me, you can still go fuck yourself.
Listen, dude. I didn't even read your first response to me, after having a peek at your response to yourself and seen just how fucking crazy you are. I hadn't seen either of them until a few minutes ago, since I haven't bothered with seeing if anyone replied to any of my comments for a few days.
In the US, handheld cellular phones are limited to 600mW, last I checked the FCC rules. Non-portable (aka, bag phones and other related tech) can do 3W. It's been awhile -- if things have changed, please let me know.
(Many years ago, I had this discussion with my now-boss, while I was doing some ad-hoc computer work for him. I told him he was wrong about the 600mW limit. Unexpectedly, he produced a bound copy of the FCC rules from his desk drawer, threw it on his desk, and asked me to prove myself right. Turns out, I was wrong. I never questioned him again.)
My house also has a steel roof, and many (not all) walls are plaster with metal lath. My Droid usually locates me just fine indoors, usually within a hundred feet or so. Worst case I've seen is when it can't get GPS at all, and seems to fall back on the location of the current tower a few blocks away -- which is also "close enough" for most things that location data is useful for indoors (searching for local restaurants, for instance).
However: I have, on one occasion, been shown to be about 300 miles northeast of where I was, when I was outside with a clear view of the sky. This persisted (with permutations like it showing me traveling northeast at a fast speed, even though I was stationary) until I rebooted the phone, and was consistent between different applications.
So. Please allow me to submit that your problem might be your femptocell, or it might be something else entirely.
Reading Woz's post makes something obvious to me: This problem would be amplified in the event of a bad brake light switch. One must wonder, then, if that is part of the severity of the issue out in the wild.
(And, yes, they do fail sometimes. I had to replace the switch on my old BMW a few years ago. That car is clever enough to tell you that the switch has failed, but most cars aren't. So, folks will generally drive around with intermittent or no brake lights until someone else tells them about it.)
I just refuse to count jailbreaking as anything more off-the-wall than any other mundane task like, say, opening a web browser, or finding a DHCP address. Every device I own that has hack value, aside from my LCD TV and PS3, is open (by jailbreaking or other less-cryptic means) for me to do what I want with it. (The car's got a couple of hacks, too.)
And so, for me, it seems useful to know what the underlying system is.
While everyone else spews bullshit, please allow me to attempt to help you with your problem with facts, logic, and (of course) anecdotes.
1. HDMI is not just a wire -- it's a specific type of wire, laid out in a certain way, with certain predetermined characteristics. It's no more "just a wire" than Cat5e or RG-6 is. But there's nothing particularly special about an HDMI cable that makes it support HDCP (which also works just fine over DVI, incidentally).
2. It's not a "works or doesn't" thing, at least, not always. It's possible to have an HDMI connection mostly work.
3. Nevertheless, cheap cables should be fine, just as cheap Cat5 should be fine. Is it always fine? Who knows? I, for one, don't have the lab gear needed to test this stuff properly, but I've got no particularly good reason to believe that cheap cables are worse, on average, than expensive ones.
Now, on with the anecdotes:
First, when I got a new TV and had cable, I bought some Monoprice HDMI cables. They worked fine with the Playstation, but I never could get them to work with the cable company's DVR, at all. Swapping cables and using different monitors proved inconclusive because all possible permutations worked fine with the DVR, except the precise combination of any of the Monoprice cables along with the cable DVR, and Samsung TV.
Replacing the Monoprice cable with a ratty-looking one that came free with a $40 DVD player worked fine. The difference? Who knows. The Monoprice cables were fairly heavy, and had ferrites on each end. The freebie cable was smaller in diameter, and lacked ferrites.
I've read of people removing ferrites (apparently a sharp using knife to get the outer casing off and a hammer to shatter the ferrite does the trick neatly), which they've said has solved similar problems. This lends some credence to the possibility that the added inductance of the ferrites, alone, was causing my problem, but I didn't try removing them.
Nowadays, I don't have cable (using AT&T Uverse instead) and the Monoprice cables work just fine.
Second: just the other day, I was goofing around behind the TV. Several hours later, the Uverse box decided it didn't like my TV anymore, with a screen explaining that it wasn't HDCP compliant. I rebooted things and fidgeted around, and the best I could get was HDMI video, but with no sound. Eventually, I unplugged the HDMI cable at both ends and plugged it back in, and things turned happy straight away. I guess it must've been just partially connected at one end or the other (which in itself is bizarre, as HDMI uses the same data lines for both audio and video).
So, in conclusion: Apparently, HDMI can break in strange ways. Try a different wire, of different construction and/or perceived quality.
As little as your local cable provider goofs around with their digital feed (which, for the most part, they don't at all -- most of horribleness happens far upstream at a regional facility), if such audio problems were endemic to that DVR, there'd be thousands of folks complaining over a broad area...but I don't see 'em.
And if all that fails, just use component video. I recognize that it's a lot like admitting defeat, but there's very little qualitative difference between a proper cheap component video feed, and a functional HDMI feed. The bits doing the DAC -> ADC conversions in modern video gear work well enough these days that you'll probably see nothing different even if you try.
I can SSH into my cheap Linksys router. It's got all of the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only a router.)
I can SSH into my iPod Touch (I don't have an iPhone). It's also got all the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only an iPod.)
So, I guess: If you were trying to draw some sort of distinction between the two things somehow, then you have failed.
My 1995 BMW 325i did not have a mechanical link between the gear shift and the automatic transmission -- the gearshift is just a big, fancy, low-current switch. I suspect that this is the case with all vehicles using GM's 4L30E.
I also had a 1996 Firebird with a 4L60E, and though I never tore into that part of the car far enough to actually see it, I understood that transmission to be completely electronically controlled as well.
My WRT54GS with 512MB of SD storage, which is plugged into an old card-edge floppy connector and soldered to various points on the board, begs to differ.
There is/was also a lot of clever stuff going on with the first Xbox.
Slashdot Mirror
The 1980's called. They want their pen plotter back.
Okay, good point. I shouldn't say that its not possible to emit RF within that package, but it certainly becomes less efficient and less practical. Range, sensitivity and power efficiency will suffer.
Less efficient and practical compared to what? An 802.11 radio+antenna which doesn't fit into a SIM card?
If so, then you're comparing apples to oranges.
(You're an engineer, aren't you?)
I agree -- it's not practical. Just look around: there's no other products that manage to shrink an antenna down in size, and still operate at 2.4GHz, are there?
Given the severe lack of anyone doing stuff like this, it must be impossible to use an antenna shorter than a quarter-wavelength for anything, ever. I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?
FWIW:
I have used this inexpensive pouch to keep my cell phone from working*, without the hassle of turning it off and back on. It worked fine**. The pouch has two compartments within it, one within the Faraday cage, and one outside of it, so you could use it as a normal cell-phone holder the rest of the time if you wanted to.
*: My employer had tracking software installed on my company phone, and while I was generally OK with that during my day, I was most most certainly NOT OK with it tracking me on my days off, or when I was on lunch. The software was able to remote-start if the server-side decided that it should be on, so exiting the app wouldn't work -- it'd just come right back after a bit. And, besides, it'd log every time the app stopped and started, and when the phone would boot. Rebooting, therefore, wasn't much of an option either, as there'd be a record for at least every time the phone turned on.
**: I had access to the website where the tracking information went. When the phone was in the bag, it had no idea what I was up to.
When I got my Droid, I paid for the whole thing ($539) in cash. I signed no contract and agreed to no terms.
YMMV.
I can already use Google Chat and AIM through Gmail's web interface.
Again: My posting was not argumentative. It was a sarcastic parody. I don't care if you, or anyone else thought it was funny -- I felt that it was, so I posted it.
But even if it were some thinly-veiled attempt at starting a broad discussion of opinion and politics: Replacing "needs" with "expenditures" is ambiguous. It only insinuates that the military's need for money may not match the amount that they receive. It could imply that I think the military is overfunded, as you seem to assume, or it could imply that I think it is underfunded.
But I really didn't put that much thought into it.
The truth is that I believe that the military is perhaps woefully underfunded, and that our troops deserve better tools and more livable paychecks for their duties. I recognize that money doesn't fall from the heavens, and that someone (aka "me") must pay for that.
But hey, as long as you're still making assumptions about me, you can still go fuck yourself.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Just because it's free software, doesn't mean that it's afraid of money.
Wow.
Listen, dude. I didn't even read your first response to me, after having a peek at your response to yourself and seen just how fucking crazy you are. I hadn't seen either of them until a few minutes ago, since I haven't bothered with seeing if anyone replied to any of my comments for a few days.
Get a fucking life.
I am liberal, you insensitive clod.
I kind of expected my sarcastic parody to be taken as something merely humorous, not as an open invitation for debate.
Go fuck yourself.
In the US, handheld cellular phones are limited to 600mW, last I checked the FCC rules. Non-portable (aka, bag phones and other related tech) can do 3W. It's been awhile -- if things have changed, please let me know.
(Many years ago, I had this discussion with my now-boss, while I was doing some ad-hoc computer work for him. I told him he was wrong about the 600mW limit. Unexpectedly, he produced a bound copy of the FCC rules from his desk drawer, threw it on his desk, and asked me to prove myself right. Turns out, I was wrong. I never questioned him again.)
This is the new, improved, Slashdot 2.0: Now SFW, and certified to be wholesome by honest and genuine Care Bears.
Even at a rate of 10% , it wouldn't pay for half of the current military expenditures.
There. Fixed that for you.
I have. Around 1992, or so.
There was a button on the keyboard labeled something like "Reset," which when pressed, would perform control-alt-delete.
I forgot, a long time ago, who made it.
Did you expect the extra componentry to somehow consume zero space?
Gosh. It seems like just yesterday[1] that NPR was causing a big fuss over deep linking of content, and here it is again on the main page.
[1]: I must be getting old.
Perhaps you're barking up the wrong tree...
My house also has a steel roof, and many (not all) walls are plaster with metal lath. My Droid usually locates me just fine indoors, usually within a hundred feet or so. Worst case I've seen is when it can't get GPS at all, and seems to fall back on the location of the current tower a few blocks away -- which is also "close enough" for most things that location data is useful for indoors (searching for local restaurants, for instance).
However: I have, on one occasion, been shown to be about 300 miles northeast of where I was, when I was outside with a clear view of the sky. This persisted (with permutations like it showing me traveling northeast at a fast speed, even though I was stationary) until I rebooted the phone, and was consistent between different applications.
So. Please allow me to submit that your problem might be your femptocell, or it might be something else entirely.
Reading Woz's post makes something obvious to me: This problem would be amplified in the event of a bad brake light switch. One must wonder, then, if that is part of the severity of the issue out in the wild.
(And, yes, they do fail sometimes. I had to replace the switch on my old BMW a few years ago. That car is clever enough to tell you that the switch has failed, but most cars aren't. So, folks will generally drive around with intermittent or no brake lights until someone else tells them about it.)
I generally agree.
I just refuse to count jailbreaking as anything more off-the-wall than any other mundane task like, say, opening a web browser, or finding a DHCP address. Every device I own that has hack value, aside from my LCD TV and PS3, is open (by jailbreaking or other less-cryptic means) for me to do what I want with it. (The car's got a couple of hacks, too.)
And so, for me, it seems useful to know what the underlying system is.
Others may not see it that way.
While everyone else spews bullshit, please allow me to attempt to help you with your problem with facts, logic, and (of course) anecdotes.
1. HDMI is not just a wire -- it's a specific type of wire, laid out in a certain way, with certain predetermined characteristics. It's no more "just a wire" than Cat5e or RG-6 is. But there's nothing particularly special about an HDMI cable that makes it support HDCP (which also works just fine over DVI, incidentally).
2. It's not a "works or doesn't" thing, at least, not always. It's possible to have an HDMI connection mostly work.
3. Nevertheless, cheap cables should be fine, just as cheap Cat5 should be fine. Is it always fine? Who knows? I, for one, don't have the lab gear needed to test this stuff properly, but I've got no particularly good reason to believe that cheap cables are worse, on average, than expensive ones.
Now, on with the anecdotes:
First, when I got a new TV and had cable, I bought some Monoprice HDMI cables. They worked fine with the Playstation, but I never could get them to work with the cable company's DVR, at all. Swapping cables and using different monitors proved inconclusive because all possible permutations worked fine with the DVR, except the precise combination of any of the Monoprice cables along with the cable DVR, and Samsung TV.
Replacing the Monoprice cable with a ratty-looking one that came free with a $40 DVD player worked fine. The difference? Who knows. The Monoprice cables were fairly heavy, and had ferrites on each end. The freebie cable was smaller in diameter, and lacked ferrites.
I've read of people removing ferrites (apparently a sharp using knife to get the outer casing off and a hammer to shatter the ferrite does the trick neatly), which they've said has solved similar problems. This lends some credence to the possibility that the added inductance of the ferrites, alone, was causing my problem, but I didn't try removing them.
Nowadays, I don't have cable (using AT&T Uverse instead) and the Monoprice cables work just fine.
Second: just the other day, I was goofing around behind the TV. Several hours later, the Uverse box decided it didn't like my TV anymore, with a screen explaining that it wasn't HDCP compliant. I rebooted things and fidgeted around, and the best I could get was HDMI video, but with no sound. Eventually, I unplugged the HDMI cable at both ends and plugged it back in, and things turned happy straight away. I guess it must've been just partially connected at one end or the other (which in itself is bizarre, as HDMI uses the same data lines for both audio and video).
So, in conclusion: Apparently, HDMI can break in strange ways. Try a different wire, of different construction and/or perceived quality.
As little as your local cable provider goofs around with their digital feed (which, for the most part, they don't at all -- most of horribleness happens far upstream at a regional facility), if such audio problems were endemic to that DVR, there'd be thousands of folks complaining over a broad area...but I don't see 'em.
And if all that fails, just use component video. I recognize that it's a lot like admitting defeat, but there's very little qualitative difference between a proper cheap component video feed, and a functional HDMI feed. The bits doing the DAC -> ADC conversions in modern video gear work well enough these days that you'll probably see nothing different even if you try.
I can SSH into my cheap Linksys router. It's got all of the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only a router.)
I can SSH into my iPod Touch (I don't have an iPhone). It's also got all the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only an iPod.)
So, I guess: If you were trying to draw some sort of distinction between the two things somehow, then you have failed.
My 1995 BMW 325i did not have a mechanical link between the gear shift and the automatic transmission -- the gearshift is just a big, fancy, low-current switch. I suspect that this is the case with all vehicles using GM's 4L30E.
I also had a 1996 Firebird with a 4L60E, and though I never tore into that part of the car far enough to actually see it, I understood that transmission to be completely electronically controlled as well.
Easy hardware hacking no longer applicable?
My WRT54GS with 512MB of SD storage, which is plugged into an old card-edge floppy connector and soldered to various points on the board, begs to differ.
There is/was also a lot of clever stuff going on with the first Xbox.
Just two examples that I'm familiar with.
An obvious and knee-jerk question, that I've not actually putting any thought into it at all:
If Akamai can do their tricks with the existing DNS structure, then why can't everyone else?
Every time I've been pestered by a "Verified by Visa" prompt, I've been successful in finding the "Fuck off" button and continuing anyway.
YMMV.