Well in my ventures into traffic shaping I've seen lots of data on load balancing as well. Most traffic shaping on GNU-Linux starts off with iptables.
A good backgrounder on iptables is at the Linux Documentation Project. (TLDP.org) You might start off with a short introduction to a simple NAT. Setting up a basic NAT is a good start before you get too far into it so you feel like you've at least got some success before you get into the deep end.
Once you feel like you've got a simple NAT down, then look for the Linux Advance Routing Howto or something of that nature. I forgot the exact title but it's close to that. That's a good one. It's dense reading, but look at the cookbook section. It has a script called wondershaper that is interesting and might give you some ideas about traffic shaping and load balancing.
Gentoo also does some nice documentation on load balancing and traffic shaping. Once you have some of the lingo down you can google around for some of the tutorials the Gentoo users have posted. Most of those tutorials can be used with the kernel that comes with Knoppix 5.0 without needing any modifications.
Personally, I think Knoppix is a good starting point for a router because it gives you a level of security in that most of your OS is read-only and the default security is pretty tight. Working with Live CDs can be a challenge if you're new to it, but a key tip is that you can quite easily modify the isolinux.cfg file on the CD to create custom boot commands burnt into a CD such as how to automatically load up your iptables scripts upon reboot. This makes a nice home-brewed embedded style device using all generic second-hand components.
Anyway, that's mostly stuff I use for traffic shaping, but it's a good start towards doing failover stuff too.
The Knoppix part may be too much of my personal preference but the part about going to TLDP and looking for the Linux Advanced Routing Howto should certainly be a good start in any case.
Because in six months the fuckin' Republican scum will be flushed down the toilet.
I have to admit I was pissed when I first saw this because I'm a huge supporter of solar thermal and have been for years. I was an avid lurker on the early solar thermal list-serves in the nineties and became totally fascinated with it in those days and have been stuck on it since. So, my blood pressure shot through the roof when I saw this. I mean the gall, using an environmental impact requirement. I mean, it's almost funny if it wasn't so upsetting.
Then as I had time to mull it over it kinda made me grin. I mean at least it shows that this is scarry enough to the Bush administration that they're fighting back. That's a good sign in itself. If I was an executive looking for funding, I'd tout this as a badge of honor. Look, this scares Republicans. Hmm, looks good going forward eh?
And then I realized it's June. Those pieces of shit are on the way out in six months. Let them declare a twenty year moratorium on applications at this point. It's all the same in terms of the real world. Investors aren't stupid, just follow the money. It's clear we're up for a change and the more the Republicans show their distaste for solar thermal the better its future is probably going to be.
Meet your buddy sodium nitrate. It is a salt that is a solid at room temperature and even up to several hundred degrees temperature. However, once it is heated by the oil in the tubes of the trough solar field or within the heliostat of a power tower it turns into a liquid.
The sodium nitrate solution or solar salt is typically just a small percentage of the actual thermal storage solution. The majority of the thermal mass being composed simply of silicate or limestone gravel. Thus, the thermal storage can easily be scaled to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons of storage primarily using on-site materials. It's an extremely efficient and low cost storage solution and depending upon the scale of the installation can provide hours to days of power without any sun. Since solar thermal sites are typically situated in areas of high insolation such as deserts, a condition were days passed without sun would be extremely rare. Thus, this is indeed a technical replacement for baseline power such as coal or nuclear.
The leader in the market for nitrate salts used in thermal storage applications, yes there's already a market in these things, is a product called HitecXL. I encourage you to google for it and inform yourself on this topic before you continue advising people about the "huge drawbacks".
I don't know what point you're looking for. I think you're looking for someone to debate a point that isn't being made. My point was simply to explain what I'm using for an antennae and how far it goes and you doubted it worked but I'm using it and it works. That's the only point being made here.
You seem to be fishing for debate on the superior performance of 802.11a to WiMax. You'll have to go down the hall for that but keep trying and you might get lucky and find someone willing to give it a shot.
showing how the range may be extended to nearly a kilometer and a half with improved amplifiers in the customer radios.
So, with these graphics, it clarifies how there could be some miscommunication about the coverage. You could both say that the furthest user from the base station is at a maximum of one kilometer and at the same time argue that a single base station could serve two customers two kilometers apart. Both of those are true and yet they mean imply slightly different things about the nature of the coverage.
Line of sight --look it up. If you are elevated on a mountainside on the coast with a nice view and you look way up the coast at another mountainside at the end of a long bay then, in my case, you are looking at a major military installation about thirty miles away. It's line-of-sight. If you can see it, you can connect to it with a microwave and an antennae. Basic concept, nothing fancy or newsworthy. Nice view, but not really newsworthy. As for how I know I'm hitting the base, well you can tell when you hit them because their base stations because they politely inform you that you are accessing military radios and are being logged and then they ask you to point your radio elsewhere.
The records for WiFi are in the hundreds of miles out in the desert across long flat plains between peaks. But you could probably do a lot more than that from a lot of sites in Tibet. It's not magic. It's just line-of-sight and a question of how big of an antennae you want to go with.
Anyway think about it for just a second. How far out do you think your satellite TV signal is coming from? Oh yeah. Forgot about that huh? Line-of-sight. If you can draw a line to it, you can hit it and an 18" parabolic satellite dish is like an eighty decibel antennae. In fact, if you use a larger dish, you start to violate some FCC regulations. Look up decibel over at Wikipedia and consider that an 18" parabolic dish is giving 80 decibel gain and consider what that implies for a line-of-site signal.
You can guess all you like, but there is plenty of information out there that you can also use to inform yourself. Your guess misses the point that WiMax is inherently symmetrical service. The reason for this is that the limit on the service is not in the ISPs sending radio but in the customer premise equipment (CPE) and the amplifiers in these little customer owned boxes are the limiting factor. However, within a kilometer they're rated at least 10mpbs upstream. That's a completely different game than DSL or cable. So, your guess is wrong.
but here's the kicker. . . using nothing but an 18" satellite TV dish from a thrift store for six bucks and a Linksys router with an external antennae taped onto the feedhorn.
Works just fine and I have hit base stations thirty miles away with full strength signals while I was getting it set up.
So, you're misinformed about 802.11a. It's a microwave signal and it's as good as the gain of your antennae in line-of-site configuration.
The Australian ISP that was whining about their deployment said they were expecting to get full strength at two kilometers and that's not even part of the spec for current generation customer premise equipment. Moreover, their VoIP problems were apparently aggravated by a shaky upstream connect at the ISP.
WiMax is not really a homogenous entity, it's more like a collection of protocols that work at different service levels according to power requirements and distance and are totally different for the sending radios and the base stations. Overall it's a system that works out to seem like a homgenous entity but that's sort of an illusion because the gory details are reserved for the ISPs. But with the power levels that are going into current customer premise equipment there are technical reasons related to amplifier performance that limit the sending power of the field radios to about a kilometer for a full strength signal and the drop-off comes pretty fast as you go beyond that.
Having said that, it's still completely true that this is no doubt much cheaper than any kind of wired infrastructure. Even if you had to put in a base station for a single user --which actually would not make sense-- you've got to compare that to the cost of a kilometer of wire and the cost of installing that wire.
But, again, it wouldn't make sense to install WiMax for a single user because the base stations have a sort of minimum density of downstream clients to make them cost effective. You basically will only see WiMax in areas where there are at least fifty users in a kilometer sized circle. That will change when the amplifiers in the base stations can be increased in power but that will not happen for several years if it does happen at all.
Still, the costs are minimal for an ISP and it does enable a new generation of small ISPs focused on remote local communities. It may not be a perfect solution for the remotest locations, but consider that you can use directional WiFi line-of-site for literally hundreds of miles as a feed into a small town and then cover the entire town with one or two WiMax base stations. If you allow users to set up their own directional WiFi with line-of-site to more remote locations you can extend that network at better than DSL upstream rates far into remote areas surrounding small towns at very low costs.
Within cities, there's no reason WiMax shouldn't cost far less than DSL or cable. Wholesale bandwidth costs are like nothing compared to what ISPs are charging in the States.
All these ARM 11s SOCs but they're all in QFBGA packaging. I wish somebody would release something in a good ol' DIP. Yeah, sure some of the pins would have to be cut out but you can go over a hundred pins on a DIP and most of these SMT BGA packages only have two hundred pins to begin with. A lot of the I/O is for fairly esoteric stuff. Just leave the video, the audio, power, ethernet and drop off all the funky DSP cellphone stuff.
Stick like eight of these breadboarded in a stack on a KVM with an LCD monitor. Geek city.
I had a similar problem with my wife being unable to send through Gmail being the problem. I had tried HTB and had some success, but it wasn't like an astonishing difference. My router, by the way, is an PII running Knoppix.
Anyway, I was getting quite desperate for a solution and I kept playing with wonder shaper from the Linux Documentation Project Advanced Routing Howto. It seemed like it helped a lot and I was sure I had the upstream queue issue under control but it wasn't all that I had hoped for.
Then finally I was taking heat from the wife again on the stupid Gmail upload thing and I started poking around for newer info. I came across this Gentoo tutorial that modified the original wonder shaper script. I modified it pretty heavily for my own situation and added some other stuff for port forwarding and kaboom, I got huge results. My downstram quadrupled and my latency dropped off like crazy. You can do shaping at home. It is a tempermental bitch though and I'm still constantly goofing with it.
Anyway, here's the link to the Gentoo script that basically changed my world. Works perfect with a copy of Knoppix 5.0. If I run it on my P2 266 with 384 megs of RAM it shows PPOE eating thirty percent of the CPU when I go over 4mbps downstream so it's doing something and the results are very obvious. It's like day and night. In fact, I had the server overheat last week and I had to get a new CPU. I may go with a beefier machine if I fry this replacement CPU. I had always assumed that a router didn't require much resources but this thing is clearly doing real work and producing real results.
You're catching on. You are correct. It is my opinion that a home is a human right and you disagree with that opinion. Great, we're one-for-one on that regard. And neither of us has convinced the other to change their opinions on this point. Isn't that great how everybody can have their own opinion.
Now, in addition, you have agreed with me that all creatures do require a place to live.
Great. We agree on the facts and the facts are that all the creatures on the planet Earth and in the future any creatures lucky enough to live on the surface of the moon do require a place to live.
We both agree that this is a fact. For me, this is a satisfactory resolution. At least I have convinced you to state publicly that all creatures do require a place to live. I will take that as a personal victory and enjoy it because in my opinion that is good enough.
I hope that someday you will be wise enough to realize that this is not, as you have stated, a trivial fact.
Thanks for your opinion. . . for what it's worth. In my estimation, that's not much given your level of argumentation but you're welcome to continue playing. I'm in no hurry.
Let me frame this in another way for you. See, this wholly unrelated side argument, often called a red herring, about rights versus needs is misleading. The topic of this article is about the human relationship to the surface of planetary bodies and, by the extension put forth in the earlier well received comment to which I was initially replying, the right of creatures on those planets including humans to have a place to live.
See, this side argument that you dear debate lovers want to get into is merely a matter of opinion because it's not specific. It's a purely rhetorical debate about opinions on what is right and what is wrong. This is also what is known as a normative debate. You seem to be obsessed with what is right and wrong, but that's not the topic at hand. What we're dealing with here is this thing called an empirical debate: do creatures require a place to live? I have stated that yes, they do and this is a fact that I have presented evidence to prove. Do you have evidence to the contrary to disprove that fact.
That fact, whether land is a basic requirement for animal life, is the topic as the thread has defined it. It's not relevant to discuss your opinion about what defines a right because that's simply your opinion. Let's stick with facts. Do you have facts to the contrary that creatures need a place to live? Go ahead and present them, but don't waste everybody's time getting lost in side arguments about right and wrong. That's just your opinion and your opinion is no better or worse than anybody else's and adds little or nothing to the debate.
So, go ahead and inform us about how the creatures of the Earth and Moon do not need housing. I'm completely fascinated to learn these new facts. Please give specific examples as I have been kind enough to do. You may even notice I was able to give an example including the name of a famous porn star. This is a helpful technique you might try to get extra points from the mods which will then lend authority to your weak red herring arguments.
Once again, we return to this sophomoric game. Let's take it slow.
What you're doing here, whether you're conscious of it or not, is redirecting the issue from the practical fact of housing into the general theory of needs versus rights. There's nothing wrong with that debate, but if you're going to pursue that line then why not bring it back to the topic at hand: people's need for housing. All you're doing is declaring that you disagree that a need is a right. You're entitled to disagree on this point and that's your opinion. You're entitled to an opinion. So am I. I disagree with you.
However, this "argument":
Need != Right
as eloquent as you may believe it to be, is nothing but stating an opinion on a general theory and speaks nothing to the human requirement for shelter. We're talking about the right to inhabit land. That's the topic at hand. Shifting off to generalizations is not a winning argument.
Because I believe I have made the case that housing is, in fact, a requirement for human life then I would say that it is indeed both a need and a right and that the two are not mutually exclusive. I say it is a right because without it a person cannot live and people do have a right to live in my opinion. You may, no doubt, disagree and you're welcome to that, but stay on the point.
What is a biological fact? You're dying to bust a nut? Help yourself there kiddo. As Galen the physician used to say --be like the fish.
I know where you're going. You want to play the "definition of right" game. That's fine, but fails on the same point. You're talking theory and I'm talking fact. People need shelter. That ain't a theory and no amount of debate will change it.
I find it astounding that people will fight to the death arguing AGAINST people's right to have a home to live in and yet there are thousands of such individuals in every web forum you go to.
You see the outcome of this "Jesus-is-Lord" attitude in the case of the Fundamentalists Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. There,the patriarchal norms set down in the Bible are manifest in polygamous relationships eventually ending up in incest.
In short, Christianity has clearly failed even though it's not immediately obvious.
You can come up with irrelevant analogies all you like, that does nothing to prove that people do not have a HUMAN RIGHT to a home. This is a simple biological fact. Human beings, with the exception of perhaps Ron Jeremy do not have a furry exterior coat to protect them from the elements. Even if they did have fur to protect them, it is clear from observations of the natural world that even furry animals typically require a burrow to sustain their lives. Making creative analogies does not change that FACT.
Yeah, but see this is where it's getting fun because they can play that game but they're not holding all of the cards any more. In the low-end of the market, it's a bit of a toss up already. If an OEM decides to go with these boards in a low-end machine they can just do Linux. Wal Mart and Dell are both selling Linux machines nowadays.
This is the same problem with MS reversing themselves on XP in the sub-notebook category. They came to Taiwan's OEMs and said OK, now you can still get XP licenses on these lightweight notebooks but you have to follow these restrictions like small screens and limited RAM. But they're playing a tricky game there because they no longer run the only game in town. What the OEMs are faced with is using XP on the crappy ones with small screens and less RAM and Linux on the sweet next generation ones with the full sized screens and 2Gigs of RAM. This is a situation being created by Microsoft's ham handed attempts to pretend they remain in control when they no longer have the control. Playing the restrictions game no longer puts them in the drivers seat. Quite to the contrary, they're insisting on being left out of the action completely.
The right question for me is how fast will it boot Knoppix from an iso image. And what kind of bizarre boot scenarios can it deal with it terms of USB or ethernet boots. I would assume it can handle pretty much all the typical stuff but I wonder if it adds any new possibilities. Perhaps something like booting a selection of isos off of a dual layer DVD filled an assortment would be cool. And what about virtualization?
One of my dozens of hobbyist hats is my glassworkers hat and annealing is a big deal in glasswork. From my experience with glass, I would say that annealing is probably the wrong term because this involves an actual deformation. Typically in annealing you want to stay below the point at which deformation occurs and your main concern is to create a gradual change in the temperature over time in order to eliminate internal stresses. So that's probably not the best word to use in this case since this is not about alleviating internal stresses but actual changes in the shape of the product.
Yeah well neither one is anything close to a through-hole dip in terms of hobby level use. The thing with the BGA is that while it's a pain in the butt to set up an oven, once you do that you have a a lot better chance of getting clear success or failure and if you get a failure you can try again. With spider legs it's like who knows which one of those dudes is the culprit when something goes wrong. If you're good at it then be all means stick with what works but with BGA you get the magic of surface tension and you can basically see when it's working and get a good guess if it was successful.
I personally have never mounted a BGA on my own at home so far and I wouldn't bother with QFP. If I can't get a through-hole piece then basically it's not for me but I have a friend who does BGA regularly and I've watched him mount a few. It's cool when they slide into place and it's a nice clean looking mount. I'd like to set up my own oven at home but it does seem like a lot of hassle.
Hey thanks for posting on the prices. I tried to ask about that yesterday and this machine died but here's the answer anyway. Thanks. That's cheap enough for the chip, but by comparing it to the Arduino then board specs become a big deal because that's one nice thing about that project is they have a lot of board info and that QFP packaging is kind of a drag. In some ways a BGA would be more friendly but either way it's a relatively large obstacle for a hobbyist. The nice thing about AVRs is you can get a DIP and just stick it straight into a breadboard. Now that's beginner level and the price is right.
I've been looking at a DAQ design from a few years ago featured on the Atmel web site. It requires a few external chips, but the uC is an 8051 which I can buy at the store for six bucks and comes in a through-hold DIP package.
I'm curious about the CAN bus on this thing though. Are you planning any projects that use it?
Found some of my old notes from when I was obsessing on this a few months back. Another way to search for information on this topic is to use the following Google search
"solar power"+"grid interface"
Apart from dozens of patent applications that are very helpful in getting an idea of how these things are built, that search pulls up all sorts of other info and one of them includes a book that is available in preview mode through Google books that goes into the topic in a general way. On page twelve he starts talking about distributed systems in the 1KW range rather than multi-megawatt systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Well in my ventures into traffic shaping I've seen lots of data on load balancing as well. Most traffic shaping on GNU-Linux starts off with iptables.
A good backgrounder on iptables is at the Linux Documentation Project. (TLDP.org) You might start off with a short introduction to a simple NAT. Setting up a basic NAT is a good start before you get too far into it so you feel like you've at least got some success before you get into the deep end.
Once you feel like you've got a simple NAT down, then look for the Linux Advance Routing Howto or something of that nature. I forgot the exact title but it's close to that. That's a good one. It's dense reading, but look at the cookbook section. It has a script called wondershaper that is interesting and might give you some ideas about traffic shaping and load balancing.
Gentoo also does some nice documentation on load balancing and traffic shaping. Once you have some of the lingo down you can google around for some of the tutorials the Gentoo users have posted. Most of those tutorials can be used with the kernel that comes with Knoppix 5.0 without needing any modifications.
Personally, I think Knoppix is a good starting point for a router because it gives you a level of security in that most of your OS is read-only and the default security is pretty tight. Working with Live CDs can be a challenge if you're new to it, but a key tip is that you can quite easily modify the isolinux.cfg file on the CD to create custom boot commands burnt into a CD such as how to automatically load up your iptables scripts upon reboot. This makes a nice home-brewed embedded style device using all generic second-hand components.
Anyway, that's mostly stuff I use for traffic shaping, but it's a good start towards doing failover stuff too.
The Knoppix part may be too much of my personal preference but the part about going to TLDP and looking for the Linux Advanced Routing Howto should certainly be a good start in any case.
Yes, I have a nice gift for him.
I would give him a proverb. This one:
Steal a sheep, give wool at mass.
Because in six months the fuckin' Republican scum will be flushed down the toilet.
I have to admit I was pissed when I first saw this because I'm a huge supporter of solar thermal and have been for years. I was an avid lurker on the early solar thermal list-serves in the nineties and became totally fascinated with it in those days and have been stuck on it since. So, my blood pressure shot through the roof when I saw this. I mean the gall, using an environmental impact requirement. I mean, it's almost funny if it wasn't so upsetting.
Then as I had time to mull it over it kinda made me grin. I mean at least it shows that this is scarry enough to the Bush administration that they're fighting back. That's a good sign in itself. If I was an executive looking for funding, I'd tout this as a badge of honor. Look, this scares Republicans. Hmm, looks good going forward eh?
And then I realized it's June. Those pieces of shit are on the way out in six months. Let them declare a twenty year moratorium on applications at this point. It's all the same in terms of the real world. Investors aren't stupid, just follow the money. It's clear we're up for a change and the more the Republicans show their distaste for solar thermal the better its future is probably going to be.
Meet your buddy sodium nitrate. It is a salt that is a solid at room temperature and even up to several hundred degrees temperature. However, once it is heated by the oil in the tubes of the trough solar field or within the heliostat of a power tower it turns into a liquid.
The sodium nitrate solution or solar salt is typically just a small percentage of the actual thermal storage solution. The majority of the thermal mass being composed simply of silicate or limestone gravel. Thus, the thermal storage can easily be scaled to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons of storage primarily using on-site materials. It's an extremely efficient and low cost storage solution and depending upon the scale of the installation can provide hours to days of power without any sun. Since solar thermal sites are typically situated in areas of high insolation such as deserts, a condition were days passed without sun would be extremely rare. Thus, this is indeed a technical replacement for baseline power such as coal or nuclear.
The leader in the market for nitrate salts used in thermal storage applications, yes there's already a market in these things, is a product called HitecXL. I encourage you to google for it and inform yourself on this topic before you continue advising people about the "huge drawbacks".
Well Dood, check it out: That's not my post you're quoting.
So why am I even replying?
I don't know what point you're looking for. I think you're looking for someone to debate a point that isn't being made. My point was simply to explain what I'm using for an antennae and how far it goes and you doubted it worked but I'm using it and it works. That's the only point being made here.
You seem to be fishing for debate on the superior performance of 802.11a to WiMax. You'll have to go down the hall for that but keep trying and you might get lucky and find someone willing to give it a shot.
What these two graphics show is first
http://i.cmpnet.com/wirelessnetdesignline/2008/06/sige-fig1.jpg
the range you would expect with currently shipping customer premise equipment
versus a second graphic
http://i.cmpnet.com/wirelessnetdesignline/2008/06/sige-fig3.jpg
showing how the range may be extended to nearly a kilometer and a half with improved amplifiers in the customer radios.
So, with these graphics, it clarifies how there could be some miscommunication about the coverage. You could both say that the furthest user from the base station is at a maximum of one kilometer and at the same time argue that a single base station could serve two customers two kilometers apart. Both of those are true and yet they mean imply slightly different things about the nature of the coverage.
Line of sight --look it up. If you are elevated on a mountainside on the coast with a nice view and you look way up the coast at another mountainside at the end of a long bay then, in my case, you are looking at a major military installation about thirty miles away. It's line-of-sight. If you can see it, you can connect to it with a microwave and an antennae. Basic concept, nothing fancy or newsworthy. Nice view, but not really newsworthy. As for how I know I'm hitting the base, well you can tell when you hit them because their base stations because they politely inform you that you are accessing military radios and are being logged and then they ask you to point your radio elsewhere.
The records for WiFi are in the hundreds of miles out in the desert across long flat plains between peaks. But you could probably do a lot more than that from a lot of sites in Tibet. It's not magic. It's just line-of-sight and a question of how big of an antennae you want to go with.
Anyway think about it for just a second. How far out do you think your satellite TV signal is coming from? Oh yeah. Forgot about that huh? Line-of-sight. If you can draw a line to it, you can hit it and an 18" parabolic satellite dish is like an eighty decibel antennae. In fact, if you use a larger dish, you start to violate some FCC regulations. Look up decibel over at Wikipedia and consider that an 18" parabolic dish is giving 80 decibel gain and consider what that implies for a line-of-site signal.
You can guess all you like, but there is plenty of information out there that you can also use to inform yourself. Your guess misses the point that WiMax is inherently symmetrical service. The reason for this is that the limit on the service is not in the ISPs sending radio but in the customer premise equipment (CPE) and the amplifiers in these little customer owned boxes are the limiting factor. However, within a kilometer they're rated at least 10mpbs upstream. That's a completely different game than DSL or cable. So, your guess is wrong.
but here's the kicker. . . using nothing but an 18" satellite TV dish from a thrift store for six bucks and a Linksys router with an external antennae taped onto the feedhorn.
Works just fine and I have hit base stations thirty miles away with full strength signals while I was getting it set up.
So, you're misinformed about 802.11a. It's a microwave signal and it's as good as the gain of your antennae in line-of-site configuration.
The Australian ISP that was whining about their deployment said they were expecting to get full strength at two kilometers and that's not even part of the spec for current generation customer premise equipment. Moreover, their VoIP problems were apparently aggravated by a shaky upstream connect at the ISP.
WiMax is not really a homogenous entity, it's more like a collection of protocols that work at different service levels according to power requirements and distance and are totally different for the sending radios and the base stations. Overall it's a system that works out to seem like a homgenous entity but that's sort of an illusion because the gory details are reserved for the ISPs. But with the power levels that are going into current customer premise equipment there are technical reasons related to amplifier performance that limit the sending power of the field radios to about a kilometer for a full strength signal and the drop-off comes pretty fast as you go beyond that.
Having said that, it's still completely true that this is no doubt much cheaper than any kind of wired infrastructure. Even if you had to put in a base station for a single user --which actually would not make sense-- you've got to compare that to the cost of a kilometer of wire and the cost of installing that wire.
But, again, it wouldn't make sense to install WiMax for a single user because the base stations have a sort of minimum density of downstream clients to make them cost effective. You basically will only see WiMax in areas where there are at least fifty users in a kilometer sized circle. That will change when the amplifiers in the base stations can be increased in power but that will not happen for several years if it does happen at all.
Still, the costs are minimal for an ISP and it does enable a new generation of small ISPs focused on remote local communities. It may not be a perfect solution for the remotest locations, but consider that you can use directional WiFi line-of-site for literally hundreds of miles as a feed into a small town and then cover the entire town with one or two WiMax base stations. If you allow users to set up their own directional WiFi with line-of-site to more remote locations you can extend that network at better than DSL upstream rates far into remote areas surrounding small towns at very low costs.
Within cities, there's no reason WiMax shouldn't cost far less than DSL or cable. Wholesale bandwidth costs are like nothing compared to what ISPs are charging in the States.
All these ARM 11s SOCs but they're all in QFBGA packaging. I wish somebody would release something in a good ol' DIP. Yeah, sure some of the pins would have to be cut out but you can go over a hundred pins on a DIP and most of these SMT BGA packages only have two hundred pins to begin with. A lot of the I/O is for fairly esoteric stuff. Just leave the video, the audio, power, ethernet and drop off all the funky DSP cellphone stuff.
Stick like eight of these breadboarded in a stack on a KVM with an LCD monitor. Geek city.
I had a similar problem with my wife being unable to send through Gmail being the problem. I had tried HTB and had some success, but it wasn't like an astonishing difference. My router, by the way, is an PII running Knoppix.
Anyway, I was getting quite desperate for a solution and I kept playing with wonder shaper from the Linux Documentation Project Advanced Routing Howto. It seemed like it helped a lot and I was sure I had the upstream queue issue under control but it wasn't all that I had hoped for.
Then finally I was taking heat from the wife again on the stupid Gmail upload thing and I started poking around for newer info. I came across this Gentoo tutorial that modified the original wonder shaper script. I modified it pretty heavily for my own situation and added some other stuff for port forwarding and kaboom, I got huge results. My downstram quadrupled and my latency dropped off like crazy. You can do shaping at home. It is a tempermental bitch though and I'm still constantly goofing with it.
Anyway, here's the link to the Gentoo script that basically changed my world. Works perfect with a copy of Knoppix 5.0. If I run it on my P2 266 with 384 megs of RAM it shows PPOE eating thirty percent of the CPU when I go over 4mbps downstream so it's doing something and the results are very obvious. It's like day and night. In fact, I had the server overheat last week and I had to get a new CPU. I may go with a beefier machine if I fry this replacement CPU. I had always assumed that a router didn't require much resources but this thing is clearly doing real work and producing real results.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Packet_Shaping
You're catching on. You are correct. It is my opinion that a home is a human right and you disagree with that opinion. Great, we're one-for-one on that regard. And neither of us has convinced the other to change their opinions on this point. Isn't that great how everybody can have their own opinion.
Now, in addition, you have agreed with me that all creatures do require a place to live.
Great. We agree on the facts and the facts are that all the creatures on the planet Earth and in the future any creatures lucky enough to live on the surface of the moon do require a place to live.
We both agree that this is a fact. For me, this is a satisfactory resolution. At least I have convinced you to state publicly that all creatures do require a place to live. I will take that as a personal victory and enjoy it because in my opinion that is good enough.
I hope that someday you will be wise enough to realize that this is not, as you have stated, a trivial fact.
Thanks for your opinion. . . for what it's worth. In my estimation, that's not much given your level of argumentation but you're welcome to continue playing. I'm in no hurry.
Let me frame this in another way for you. See, this wholly unrelated side argument, often called a red herring, about rights versus needs is misleading. The topic of this article is about the human relationship to the surface of planetary bodies and, by the extension put forth in the earlier well received comment to which I was initially replying, the right of creatures on those planets including humans to have a place to live.
See, this side argument that you dear debate lovers want to get into is merely a matter of opinion because it's not specific. It's a purely rhetorical debate about opinions on what is right and what is wrong. This is also what is known as a normative debate. You seem to be obsessed with what is right and wrong, but that's not the topic at hand. What we're dealing with here is this thing called an empirical debate: do creatures require a place to live? I have stated that yes, they do and this is a fact that I have presented evidence to prove. Do you have evidence to the contrary to disprove that fact.
That fact, whether land is a basic requirement for animal life, is the topic as the thread has defined it. It's not relevant to discuss your opinion about what defines a right because that's simply your opinion. Let's stick with facts. Do you have facts to the contrary that creatures need a place to live? Go ahead and present them, but don't waste everybody's time getting lost in side arguments about right and wrong. That's just your opinion and your opinion is no better or worse than anybody else's and adds little or nothing to the debate.
So, go ahead and inform us about how the creatures of the Earth and Moon do not need housing. I'm completely fascinated to learn these new facts. Please give specific examples as I have been kind enough to do. You may even notice I was able to give an example including the name of a famous porn star. This is a helpful technique you might try to get extra points from the mods which will then lend authority to your weak red herring arguments.
Once again, we return to this sophomoric game. Let's take it slow.
What you're doing here, whether you're conscious of it or not, is redirecting the issue from the practical fact of housing into the general theory of needs versus rights. There's nothing wrong with that debate, but if you're going to pursue that line then why not bring it back to the topic at hand: people's need for housing. All you're doing is declaring that you disagree that a need is a right. You're entitled to disagree on this point and that's your opinion. You're entitled to an opinion. So am I. I disagree with you.
However, this "argument":
Need != Right
as eloquent as you may believe it to be, is nothing but stating an opinion on a general theory and speaks nothing to the human requirement for shelter. We're talking about the right to inhabit land. That's the topic at hand. Shifting off to generalizations is not a winning argument.
Because I believe I have made the case that housing is, in fact, a requirement for human life then I would say that it is indeed both a need and a right and that the two are not mutually exclusive. I say it is a right because without it a person cannot live and people do have a right to live in my opinion. You may, no doubt, disagree and you're welcome to that, but stay on the point.
What is a biological fact? You're dying to bust a nut? Help yourself there kiddo. As Galen the physician used to say --be like the fish.
I know where you're going. You want to play the "definition of right" game. That's fine, but fails on the same point. You're talking theory and I'm talking fact. People need shelter. That ain't a theory and no amount of debate will change it.
I find it astounding that people will fight to the death arguing AGAINST people's right to have a home to live in and yet there are thousands of such individuals in every web forum you go to.
You see the outcome of this "Jesus-is-Lord" attitude in the case of the Fundamentalists Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. There,the patriarchal norms set down in the Bible are manifest in polygamous relationships eventually ending up in incest.
In short, Christianity has clearly failed even though it's not immediately obvious.
You can come up with irrelevant analogies all you like, that does nothing to prove that people do not have a HUMAN RIGHT to a home. This is a simple biological fact. Human beings, with the exception of perhaps Ron Jeremy do not have a furry exterior coat to protect them from the elements. Even if they did have fur to protect them, it is clear from observations of the natural world that even furry animals typically require a burrow to sustain their lives. Making creative analogies does not change that FACT.
Yeah, but see this is where it's getting fun because they can play that game but they're not holding all of the cards any more. In the low-end of the market, it's a bit of a toss up already. If an OEM decides to go with these boards in a low-end machine they can just do Linux. Wal Mart and Dell are both selling Linux machines nowadays.
This is the same problem with MS reversing themselves on XP in the sub-notebook category. They came to Taiwan's OEMs and said OK, now you can still get XP licenses on these lightweight notebooks but you have to follow these restrictions like small screens and limited RAM. But they're playing a tricky game there because they no longer run the only game in town. What the OEMs are faced with is using XP on the crappy ones with small screens and less RAM and Linux on the sweet next generation ones with the full sized screens and 2Gigs of RAM. This is a situation being created by Microsoft's ham handed attempts to pretend they remain in control when they no longer have the control. Playing the restrictions game no longer puts them in the drivers seat. Quite to the contrary, they're insisting on being left out of the action completely.
The right question for me is how fast will it boot Knoppix from an iso image. And what kind of bizarre boot scenarios can it deal with it terms of USB or ethernet boots. I would assume it can handle pretty much all the typical stuff but I wonder if it adds any new possibilities. Perhaps something like booting a selection of isos off of a dual layer DVD filled an assortment would be cool. And what about virtualization?
One of my dozens of hobbyist hats is my glassworkers hat and annealing is a big deal in glasswork. From my experience with glass, I would say that annealing is probably the wrong term because this involves an actual deformation. Typically in annealing you want to stay below the point at which deformation occurs and your main concern is to create a gradual change in the temperature over time in order to eliminate internal stresses. So that's probably not the best word to use in this case since this is not about alleviating internal stresses but actual changes in the shape of the product.
Yeah well neither one is anything close to a through-hole dip in terms of hobby level use. The thing with the BGA is that while it's a pain in the butt to set up an oven, once you do that you have a a lot better chance of getting clear success or failure and if you get a failure you can try again. With spider legs it's like who knows which one of those dudes is the culprit when something goes wrong. If you're good at it then be all means stick with what works but with BGA you get the magic of surface tension and you can basically see when it's working and get a good guess if it was successful.
I personally have never mounted a BGA on my own at home so far and I wouldn't bother with QFP. If I can't get a through-hole piece then basically it's not for me but I have a friend who does BGA regularly and I've watched him mount a few. It's cool when they slide into place and it's a nice clean looking mount. I'd like to set up my own oven at home but it does seem like a lot of hassle.
Hey thanks for posting on the prices. I tried to ask about that yesterday and this machine died but here's the answer anyway. Thanks. That's cheap enough for the chip, but by comparing it to the Arduino then board specs become a big deal because that's one nice thing about that project is they have a lot of board info and that QFP packaging is kind of a drag. In some ways a BGA would be more friendly but either way it's a relatively large obstacle for a hobbyist. The nice thing about AVRs is you can get a DIP and just stick it straight into a breadboard. Now that's beginner level and the price is right.
I've been looking at a DAQ design from a few years ago featured on the Atmel web site. It requires a few external chips, but the uC is an 8051 which I can buy at the store for six bucks and comes in a through-hold DIP package.
I'm curious about the CAN bus on this thing though. Are you planning any projects that use it?
Found some of my old notes from when I was obsessing on this a few months back. Another way to search for information on this topic is to use the following Google search
"solar power"+"grid interface"
Apart from dozens of patent applications that are very helpful in getting an idea of how these things are built, that search pulls up all sorts of other info and one of them includes a book that is available in preview mode through Google books that goes into the topic in a general way. On page twelve he starts talking about distributed systems in the 1KW range rather than multi-megawatt systems.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=X8OXLvUSaW0C&pg=PT34&lpg=PT34&dq=%22solar+power%22+%2B%22grid+interface%22&source=web&ots=r56LpiTfmw&sig=jXJeZVV5NvkyleAbRZznUZqRWcA&hl=en#PPT7,M1