The proposed CAT doesn't sound like it breaks NAT but simply replaces it (or works with some sort of enhanced NAT). As long as folks have a way to run a NAT service (i.e., running a Linux router behind the cable modem), the "nightmare scenario" of bandwidth sharing won't be stopped other than through bandwidth usage monitoring, which can be done now.
CAT might be helpful to manage sanctioned home-networking schemes, but it won't solve the problem the article addresses.
Talk about the one-sideness of recent copyright changes ignores the controls built in to our governmental/judiciary system that are designed to make it hard for changes to happen abruptly. The political pendulum swings and ultimately reaches equilibrium, but only slowly.
Right now, we're in a phase where the copyright holders are clearly in control. But that hasn't always been, and won't always be, the case. Between the legislature and the judiciary, sooner or later a balance is achieved that the citizenry deems acceptable.
The problem is that the computer community expects issues of policy to be resolved in days (if not sooner) while the governmental system's time constant is decades.
Yeah, but Fox is the network that made its name breaking the rules. A few years ago there was a debate over whether executions should be televised. The best comment out of that was that if Fox had the chance, executions would be televised not only live, but in the nude.
I've had pretty good luck with register.com; they're responsive via phone or email. They haven't screwed up much, but when they do, I always get the sense it's basic incompetence, as opposed to the active hostility that you get from NSI.
This is the ???th article in./ in the last couple of months about building a wireless infrastructure on top of 802.xx.
You need to realize that these unlicensed services operate on frequencies that are specifically not guaranteed protection from interference, and which are shared with other users.
The power levels unlicensed systems can legally use are very low, and they are vulnerable to interference from cordless phones, other wireless data users, and other services sharing these unlicensed bands.
All things considered, these systems have worked remarkably well so far, but they are fragile and there's no guarantee they'll continue working.
It's hard to be certain from just the picture, but it looks like the antenna has a 1/4 wave coaxial sleeve. The terminology may not be technically accurate (since IIRC the sleeve is for decoupling rather than radiation), but I've often heard of such antennas referred to as "vertical dipoles."
So, he may not be too far off the mark in using the "dipole" shorthand.
The Phoenix Project folks are pushing hydrogen as a general replacement for petroleum. I looked at a bunch of their literature a year or so ago and it has if not a crackpot flavor, at least a bit of zealotry behind it.
That's not to say their ideas are without value, but they definitely have an agenda.
Is there a "standard" speedstep utility, or is it machine/OS dependent? My Sony Vaio laptop originally came with Windows ME and had a utility to control CPU speed.
When I installed generic Win2k to reduce the pain, I found that Sony didn't have a Win2k version of the speedstep utility (and the restore process makes it damn difficult, if not impossible, to reinstall just one component from the Windows ME restore CDs).
If there's a generic utility I can download to allow speedstep speed control, I haven't been able to find it. If it exists, I'd love to get a pointer to it.
Software Defined Radios are going to change the radio world (the two-way radio world at least) in dramatic ways. They open up the possibility of completely getting rid of the "real estate" approach to spectrum allocation.
It's still very expensive to do a true SDR that can suck in DC to daylight (or any reasonable subset thereof) and digitize it. However, you can take beginning steps by using traditional methods for the "front end" of the radio, and using DSP techniques at the back end. Hams are doing that now, and we're seeing some very interesting results.
Bob Larkin, W7PUA, developed a DSP radio called the DSP-10 that works at the ham 2M (144-148MHz) band, with a DSP board that's essentially a souped-up sound card. In addition to handling normal communication modes, Bob programmed the DSP for several unique modes that involve extremely narrow bandwidths (easy for DSP, virtually impossible to do in analog) and very long data integration times.
The result is that a pair of these radios were able to talk to each other via "moonbounce" (yes, bouncing signals off the moon) with power levels and antennas far below the macho amplifiers and antennas normally required.
Yes, it was cool of IBM to publish the details, including the BIOS source code, of the PC. However (as the article notes) IBM kept the copyright and this caused lots of problems. None of today's BIOSes, except IBM's and a few licensees, derive from that source code.
IBM vigorously pursued any clone maker that didn't very carefully reverse-engineer their BIOS using clean room techniques. At least until very late in the game, you couldn't buy a BIOS license from IBM; if they called you on the carpet, the only course open was to revise your BIOS until IBM was happy with it.
In addition to threats of litigation against US clone makers, they also enlisted the US Customs service to impound shipments of PCs entering the US that IBM claimed had infringing BIOSes. In fact, IBM gave software to Customs to allow them to test for infringement -- if the IBM software said the BIOS was "too similar", the PCs were assumed guilty until the importer could prove their innocence. Several offshore clone companies died this way.
Phoenix and other BIOS companies that developed clean room BIOSes were the direct result of this, as was a very profitable business by National Software Testing Labs and others to do BIOS infringement evaluations. Lots and lots of money was spent to come up BIOS code that was both compatible and non-infringing. Writing assembly language interrupt routines that acted precisely like IBM's, but looked sufficiently different to avoid infringement claims was about the least pleasant programming task imaginable.
The Purple Book may have made clones possible, but IBM's copyright enforcement added lots of unnecessary cost to the clone market, without even adding much to IBM's bottom line (the money went to the reverse engineering industry, not to IBM).
Microsoft is in no way the first "truly unaccountable" corporation. It's merely the 21st century equivalent of the Jay Gould/Rockefeller/Carnegie trusts at the turn of the last century. They're the ones that spawned the antitrust laws that are now being used (ineffectually) against Microsoft.
A bit of a tangent, but this article also brings up the tremendous concentration of ownership in the broadcasting world today. Clear Channel bought 126 stations in 3 months. God knows how many they own in total.
Contrast that with the Good Old Days. When I studied broadcasting in the late 1970s, the rules were that no single company could own more than seven AM stations, seven FM stations, and five TV stations (I think they may have gotten two more UHF stations, but no one cared about UHF then). And, they couldn't own more than one of each in a given market.
You can argue that cable and internet broadcasting make ownership concentration of on-air stations irrelevant, but I don't buy it. Lots of people still listen to lots of radio, and their opportunity to hear diverse programming (in the real sense, not just artificial formats) has been drastically reduced in the last twenty years.
We know lots of people send spam. If it doesn't pay, presumably (sooner or later) they'll stop. Anyone know what the response rate is on the various offers? Does anyone (except the sellers of address lists and bulkmail programs) make real money off spam?
I don't have any love for ICANN, but this article doesn't provide any insight or real information. His background provides initial credibility, but his words undermine it.
If the idea is to make CDs that will only play in a CDDA player, wouldn't it be easy to hack the hardware to pick up the digital stream before it goes into the D/A converter and output it to a digital interface into the computer? You'd lose the speed advantage of 52x CD-ROMs, but you should still be able to grab the bitstream.
The patent office checks claimed inventions against the "prior art" to make sure that patents are granted only on new inventions. Unfortunately, they do a lousy job at it and don't have access to many publications that may contain prior art that may block a patent. I don't know whether the economic model of this service is good, but the concept is a very valuable one.
Stopping stupid patents is something that individuals can do. As an example, several years ago a company obtained a patent on a channel access method for digital radio systems. It turns out that Phil Karn, a ham radio operator/networking guru/author/coder extrordinaire had published an article about this same concept -- even using the same name and acronym for it -- several years earlier.
Phil filed an objection to the patent based on his published prior art, and the patent was invalidated. Had the patent office known about the CNC/DCC Proceedings, the patent would never have issued in the first place.
The moral is that sometimes, the little guy can win!
That's one of the interesting twists that software has made to the copyright law. When you buy a book, it's subject to the "first sale doctrine" which means that the original seller can't put restrictions on your right to resell that copy of the book... the owner's control is terminated by the sale, and although he can prevent your from making further copies of the book, he can't control what you do with the copy you own.
To get around that horrible concept, the software industry early on adopted the idea that software would be licensed, not sold by the copy as books are. The theory is that you don't own anything but the physical media, and all your rights are subject to the license. And, the first sale doctrine doesn't apply when there isn't a sale.
Thus, software licenses can impose whatever onerous restrictions they can think of, and have at least a reasonable argument that they're enforceable.
We're now seeing the licensing concept loop back to literary works through ebooks and other digital formats. (Remember the thing a few months ago about the dental school ebooks that had horrible license terms?) The first sale doctrine is probably dead -- to the extent it ever lived -- with respect to digital media.
If you want to remember the "good old days," think back to the original Borland "no nonsense license" for Turbo Pascal that essentially said the software disks were the same as a book. That was the most sensible license for consumer software that I've ever seen.
I just went to the napster site and instead of getting directly to napster had half a dozen windows for various music and other sites pop up before delivering me to the real site.
Did someone hijack their DNS, or is there internal vandalism going on?
Kenwood makes a webcam-like device called the "Visual Communicator 1" (VC-1) that converts the picture to audio tones which can be sent via a two-way voice radio (like a business band radio). It was really designed for ham radio use, but there's no reason you couldn't use it on a business system if the other users would put up with hearing the warbling audio tone for thirty seconds or so each time a picture was transmitted. The pictures can be decoded and saved as.jpg or whatever using software that runs on a laptop hooked to a radio receiver.
It's quite small -- it looks like an overgrown hand-held radio microphone and the picture quality is "decent" but not spectacular. It costs somewhere between $200 and $300.
Depending on the system used the range could be in several ten's of miles (particularly if there's a "repeater" on the radio system).
FCC certification means that the product complies with the rules wrt power output, etc., but compliant equipment can -- and does -- interfere badly with other compliant equipment. In particular, frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) transmitters can dramatically reduce the performance of nearby direct sequence SS devices, even if both systems are certified. I have personal experience with a rooftop 900 MHz DSSS system being wiped out by an FHSS system on the same roof. As another example, a 2.4GHz Part 15 wireless telephone will seriously degrade a nearby Wavelan-style unit.
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The proposed CAT doesn't sound like it breaks NAT but simply replaces it (or works with some sort of enhanced NAT). As long as folks have a way to run a NAT service (i.e., running a Linux router behind the cable modem), the "nightmare scenario" of bandwidth sharing won't be stopped other than through bandwidth usage monitoring, which can be done now.
CAT might be helpful to manage sanctioned home-networking schemes, but it won't solve the problem the article addresses.
Mod the parent article up!!!
Talk about the one-sideness of recent copyright changes ignores the controls built in to our governmental/judiciary system that are designed to make it hard for changes to happen abruptly. The political pendulum swings and ultimately reaches equilibrium, but only slowly.
Right now, we're in a phase where the copyright holders are clearly in control. But that hasn't always been, and won't always be, the case. Between the legislature and the judiciary, sooner or later a balance is achieved that the citizenry deems acceptable.
The problem is that the computer community expects issues of policy to be resolved in days (if not sooner) while the governmental system's time constant is decades.
Yeah, but Fox is the network that made its name breaking the rules. A few years ago there was a debate over whether executions should be televised. The best comment out of that was that if Fox had the chance, executions would be televised not only live, but in the nude.
I've had pretty good luck with register.com; they're responsive via phone or email. They haven't screwed up much, but when they do, I always get the sense it's basic incompetence, as opposed to the active hostility that you get from NSI.
This is the ???th article in ./ in the last couple of months about building a wireless infrastructure on top of 802.xx.
You need to realize that these unlicensed services operate on frequencies that are specifically not guaranteed protection from interference, and which are shared with other users.
The power levels unlicensed systems can legally use are very low, and they are vulnerable to interference from cordless phones, other wireless data users, and other services sharing these unlicensed bands.
All things considered, these systems have worked remarkably well so far, but they are fragile and there's no guarantee they'll continue working.
It's hard to be certain from just the picture, but it looks like the antenna has a 1/4 wave coaxial sleeve. The terminology may not be technically accurate (since IIRC the sleeve is for decoupling rather than radiation), but I've often heard of such antennas referred to as "vertical dipoles."
So, he may not be too far off the mark in using the "dipole" shorthand.
That's not to say their ideas are without value, but they definitely have an agenda.
When I installed generic Win2k to reduce the pain, I found that Sony didn't have a Win2k version of the speedstep utility (and the restore process makes it damn difficult, if not impossible, to reinstall just one component from the Windows ME restore CDs).
If there's a generic utility I can download to allow speedstep speed control, I haven't been able to find it. If it exists, I'd love to get a pointer to it.
"Don't want money. Got money. Want love."
It's still very expensive to do a true SDR that can suck in DC to daylight (or any reasonable subset thereof) and digitize it. However, you can take beginning steps by using traditional methods for the "front end" of the radio, and using DSP techniques at the back end. Hams are doing that now, and we're seeing some very interesting results.
Bob Larkin, W7PUA, developed a DSP radio called the DSP-10 that works at the ham 2M (144-148MHz) band, with a DSP board that's essentially a souped-up sound card. In addition to handling normal communication modes, Bob programmed the DSP for several unique modes that involve extremely narrow bandwidths (easy for DSP, virtually impossible to do in analog) and very long data integration times.
The result is that a pair of these radios were able to talk to each other via "moonbounce" (yes, bouncing signals off the moon) with power levels and antennas far below the macho amplifiers and antennas normally required.
The DSP-10 software is fully open source, so it's wide open for experimenters to work with. The radio itself is being sold as a kit by TAPR (http://www.tapr.org), a ham radio R&D organization. Details on the DSP-10 are at http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fdsp10.html.
IBM vigorously pursued any clone maker that didn't very carefully reverse-engineer their BIOS using clean room techniques. At least until very late in the game, you couldn't buy a BIOS license from IBM; if they called you on the carpet, the only course open was to revise your BIOS until IBM was happy with it.
In addition to threats of litigation against US clone makers, they also enlisted the US Customs service to impound shipments of PCs entering the US that IBM claimed had infringing BIOSes. In fact, IBM gave software to Customs to allow them to test for infringement -- if the IBM software said the BIOS was "too similar", the PCs were assumed guilty until the importer could prove their innocence. Several offshore clone companies died this way.
Phoenix and other BIOS companies that developed clean room BIOSes were the direct result of this, as was a very profitable business by National Software Testing Labs and others to do BIOS infringement evaluations. Lots and lots of money was spent to come up BIOS code that was both compatible and non-infringing. Writing assembly language interrupt routines that acted precisely like IBM's, but looked sufficiently different to avoid infringement claims was about the least pleasant programming task imaginable.
The Purple Book may have made clones possible, but IBM's copyright enforcement added lots of unnecessary cost to the clone market, without even adding much to IBM's bottom line (the money went to the reverse engineering industry, not to IBM).
If you didn't have a reason to support the EFF before, you do now. They're going to need the community's support -- big time -- for this fight.
Microsoft is in no way the first "truly unaccountable" corporation. It's merely the 21st century equivalent of the Jay Gould/Rockefeller/Carnegie trusts at the turn of the last century. They're the ones that spawned the antitrust laws that are now being used (ineffectually) against Microsoft.
Contrast that with the Good Old Days. When I studied broadcasting in the late 1970s, the rules were that no single company could own more than seven AM stations, seven FM stations, and five TV stations (I think they may have gotten two more UHF stations, but no one cared about UHF then). And, they couldn't own more than one of each in a given market.
You can argue that cable and internet broadcasting make ownership concentration of on-air stations irrelevant, but I don't buy it. Lots of people still listen to lots of radio, and their opportunity to hear diverse programming (in the real sense, not just artificial formats) has been drastically reduced in the last twenty years.
The obvious solution: The LG Internet Microwave.
We know lots of people send spam. If it doesn't pay, presumably (sooner or later) they'll stop. Anyone know what the response rate is on the various offers? Does anyone (except the sellers of address lists and bulkmail programs) make real money off spam?
I don't have any love for ICANN, but this article doesn't provide any insight or real information. His background provides initial credibility, but his words undermine it.
If the idea is to make CDs that will only play in a CDDA player, wouldn't it be easy to hack the hardware to pick up the digital stream before it goes into the D/A converter and output it to a digital interface into the computer? You'd lose the speed advantage of 52x CD-ROMs, but you should still be able to grab the bitstream.
Stopping stupid patents is something that individuals can do. As an example, several years ago a company obtained a patent on a channel access method for digital radio systems. It turns out that Phil Karn, a ham radio operator/networking guru/author/coder extrordinaire had published an article about this same concept -- even using the same name and acronym for it -- several years earlier.
The patent office hadn't seen it because the article was published in the ARRL/TAPR Computer Networking Conference/Digital Communications Conference Proceedings, a journal fairly well known to hams who do digital radio, but not to the outside world.
Phil filed an objection to the patent based on his published prior art, and the patent was invalidated. Had the patent office known about the CNC/DCC Proceedings, the patent would never have issued in the first place.
The moral is that sometimes, the little guy can win!
I was hoping this would be about a commercially available rackmount chassis for a reasonable price. That's what the world really needs.
To get around that horrible concept, the software industry early on adopted the idea that software would be licensed, not sold by the copy as books are. The theory is that you don't own anything but the physical media, and all your rights are subject to the license. And, the first sale doctrine doesn't apply when there isn't a sale.
Thus, software licenses can impose whatever onerous restrictions they can think of, and have at least a reasonable argument that they're enforceable.
We're now seeing the licensing concept loop back to literary works through ebooks and other digital formats. (Remember the thing a few months ago about the dental school ebooks that had horrible license terms?) The first sale doctrine is probably dead -- to the extent it ever lived -- with respect to digital media.
If you want to remember the "good old days," think back to the original Borland "no nonsense license" for Turbo Pascal that essentially said the software disks were the same as a book. That was the most sensible license for consumer software that I've ever seen.
Did someone hijack their DNS, or is there internal vandalism going on?
It's quite small -- it looks like an overgrown hand-held radio microphone and the picture quality is "decent" but not spectacular. It costs somewhere between $200 and $300.
Depending on the system used the range could be in several ten's of miles (particularly if there's a "repeater" on the radio system).
Microsoft says, "Linux Double-plus Ungood"
FCC certification means that the product complies with the rules wrt power output, etc., but compliant equipment can -- and does -- interfere badly with other compliant equipment. In particular, frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) transmitters can dramatically reduce the performance of nearby direct sequence SS devices, even if both systems are certified. I have personal experience with a rooftop 900 MHz DSSS system being wiped out by an FHSS system on the same roof. As another example, a 2.4GHz Part 15 wireless telephone will seriously degrade a nearby Wavelan-style unit.