Ahh, but if somebody leaves their laptop chained to a desk with other people, they are more likely to interfere if the person is *obviously* picking it instead of carefully unscrewing their pen.
So there really is a difference because, after all, laptop locks are probably for show anyway.
I just follow the "don't let one's laptop out of sight" strategy. Works well.
I've always felt that anything that uses anything not easily cut with either a dremel or a pair of cable clippers to be really more show than anything else.
Not to say that doesn't help. It's pretty unquestionable to everybody else in the room that the person currently making lots of noise and the characteristic nasty odor of cutting through metal is not the legitimate owner.
Well, either case, you take advantage of Shannon's Limit. As you increase the size of the channel, you reduce the decibels of gain required to get information through.
I think you have things reversed. WiFi uses DSSS and cordless phones use FHSS, from what I was reading.
Now, the one suggested explanation I've seen about 2.4 GHz cordless vs. WiFi is that one device having FHSS and another having DSSS will tend to bring out the worst-case conflict behaviour. It sounds like FHSS doesn't look like the gausian noise that all of the spread-spectrum assumptions are built around to a DSSS radio. It sounds like, however, it's dependent on the exact implementation of FHSS and DSSS.
The FCC's regulating just as much as they did before because they are beholden to congressional smack-downs paid for by incumbent broadcasters, their traditional responsibilities, and the potential to look really good by taking people's unused spectrum away and auctioning it off.
There's a big one happening once they get rid of analog TV and get everybody to use HDTV.
Mandating the broadcast flag and wiretapping is but a tiny piece of the FCC's present and future jack-booted thug job.
850 is a synonym for 800, when you are talking about cellular.
Either way, it is the frequencies of 824-849MHz and 869-894MHz. It's just that the GSM folks added a 50 to the 800 to be more precise.
This is why you really need to snicker when Sprint advertizes that they are the "nation's largest all-digital all-PCS network". AT&T and Cingular have some presence on the 850 band. Basicly, Sprint's advertizing that they got to the party late and that they suck. The big thing that AT&T and Cingular have been up to lately is getting rid of TDMA service on the 850 band and using GSM instead.
The big thing is that there's room for 2 providers (A and B, if you ever used an old cell phone) in the 850 band, but there's room for 6 providers in the 1900 band. Part of why it makes sense for AT&T and Cingular to merge is that they will be able to combine their respective 850 bands and will, especially when they get UMTS (which handles the sorts of multipath you find in cities as well as CDMA does and GSM does not) rolled out and potentially give Verizon a run for their money.
The cordless phone manufacturers have been playing quite a game over the past decade. They keep trying to get you to upgrade phones to a "higher" megahertz phone because they know that you are already being told by Intel to upgrade your CPU to a "higher" megahertz CPU.
So, here's the thing. It's a general rule that as you go up in megahertz, the ability to penetrate walls goes down. Thus, the higher the megahertz, the lower the effective range. Consumer Reports did some tests here and showed that this carries over to reality. This is also why Verizon Wireless tends to have better reception -- they are primarily on the 850 MHz band instead of the 1900 MHz band.
So what have you gotten by upgrading to an "advanced" 2.4 or 5.8 GHz phone? Less range, although generally enough range to make it around a "normal" house.
Now, in order to produce a device that works in the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz band without a license the FCC requires you to be spread-spectrum.
There's some upsides and downsides here. First, some of the spread-spectrum devices, most notably older ones, didn't use very good spread-spectrum methods.
Second, in *theory* if everything's optimized properly, you can use some number of devices and they will all be perceived as "noise" to all of the other devices. So as you add more functioning devices in general, they will all start to experience interference. The problem is when devices using conflicting spread spectrum techniques are in use.
Third, microwaves and other such RF-heating applications, are covered underneath a different set of FCC rules, which generally are built around not causing your eyeballs to be fried overeasy (your eyeballs are the first thing to suffer damage from microwaves, which is why staring at the microwave window is not the world's brightest idea) Microwaves are supposed to be Faraday cages, but sometimes there's a leak. I'd start to wonder about my Microwave's safety if it started interfering with my WiFi, mind you.
Fourth, if there's interference and undesired performance, you have essentially no recourse. I've been thinking that they really should have allocated a frequency band that's reserved for only devices using a 802.11-standard protocol, but that decision really should have been made a long time ago. Oh, and if you start interfering with something important (That's the "Harmfull Interference" they speak of on the FCC warning on the back of a device) you can and will have government folks knocking on your doorstep. There have been documented cases of equipment interfering with aircraft navigation signals from the ground, which makes the airlines very unhappy and tends to get investigated.;)
I'm really wondering what the "Wifi-Friendly" cordless phones are actually. Especially given that VTech is the folks who are advertising it. As I've mentioned above, in *theory* any device on the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5.4/5.8 GHz ISM bands (they are actually the same thing) shouldn't prevent each other from working and should just be perceivable as noise Also, *in theory*, one could "do better" by listening for 802.11b/g activity and actively routing around it. This is the big difference between Bluetooth 1.1 and 1.2. But that's more circuitry, so I'm not entirely sure if they are actually doing that, or they just put them in a test lab to see what happens. They'll probably insist that it took years of engineering time and it's a special feature, even if it's more the second.;)
I personally have just stuck to 900 MHz phones. Like I said, all things being equal, they tend to have longer range. Plus, I figure that having absolutely no interference is better than having a measured amount while the phone is in use.;)
Sure my WiFi uses 802.11b, which is 2.4 GHz, but there's some darn good reasons for why one should keep 802.11a around.
The main one is that 802.11a is usually faster than 802.11g at close range. So I have a halfassed
Ah, you are probably correct in that aspect -- Tis not a verifiable lie, just a lot of literary dancing around. Funny. But then, that's what getting a lot of emails will cause you to do, I suppose.
Nontheless, I still think that it's awfully hard for them to have thought far enough ahead to realize that girl.com wasn't appropriate but it was OK to direct traffic from an emotionally charged book at somebody's personal page. The point is, there was already a lot of evidence in 2000 that indicated that what they were doing was an incredibly *bad* idea. Maybe I'm just expecting intelligence out of people that's unreasonable, or something.
And, really, it's quite classy of Kathy T to have actually posted some sort of statemnt of appology. I'd love to see if Aftab does a similar gesture...
See, I think there's a limit that some folks have crossed. On one side of the line, there's emailing Katie Jones a letter of encouragement or contacting Penguin and letting them know that they did wrong and wouldn't it be nice if they, albeit 4 years late, tried to do something to make it right. On the other side of the line, there's turning this into your personal vendetta and sending incredibly crude letters to Katie T. Which is really dumb, no matter what planet you're from.
The problem is, the statistics aren't good. Aftab's rebuttal (there's no e at the end), unless she prostrates herself and asks for forgiveness, won't answer anything. When you have an issue regarding a conversation between two people, where there probably isn't any real record of it, there's never a good definitive ending where you can tell who was really telling the truth or not.
I had those sorts of thoughts, however, I tend to believe KJ more.
First, by the year 2000, folks realized that a domain name is something big and that owning any referenced URLs is also important. I mean, this wasn't 1989, before the September That Never Ended, this was 2000. And this isn't the first time that Penguin has tried to pull these sorts of stunts, either. Big companies have *never* had any sort of interest in the little guy and his personal page if said personal page gets in their way.
Second, in the only statements that have been made by Katie T about the issue, verifiable lies were said. Like Katie T trying to claim that she's not associated with Aftab, yet there being links on her page to Aftab.
I mean, the problem is, no matter how you dice it, Penguin did wrong. It's public record that her domain name was registered in 1996 and the book came out in 2000.
Re:Is Parry Aftab Katie Tarbox's lawyer?
on
Katie Jones Interviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
See, that's interesting.
If you check out Katiesplace.org, you see Katie T, and Parry Aftab's name promenantly.
If you check out Katie T's projects page, she also mentions Parry Aftab as being part of these projects.
If you check out Parry's blog, she talks about katiesplace.com being a collaboration between her and Katie T.
Nope. Sounds like Parry is working with Katie T to me, as shown by publicly available information on the pages "controlled" by the respective folks. Thus, Katie Jones still has the story with more easily verifiable truth to it.
From my nobody-knows-about-it list:* EOS -- Before SimCity came out, there was EOS. Your job, as a player, is to shape the space program to build space stations, colonies, moon bases, etc. (Apple II series is all I've ever heard of it being for) * Neuromancer -- Back when they were going to make a movie for Neuromancer (but before Gibson realized that one shouldn't sell movie rights to a pair of cabana boys) they made a tie-in game. Doesn't really feel like the book and is, in a real sense, a little too funny, but still amusing to play. People give me weird looks when I make reference to sleeping in a plate of spagetti. (Apple II, Apple IIgs, Amiga, etc) * Sky Kid -- Underrated NES game. * QIX -- Suddenly one of the Xscreensavers makes sense. * Tradewars 2002 -- Classic BBS game, from back in the days.
I agree that the radiation that the Apollo crews experienced was pretty nasty. The continuous doses that the low earth orbit astronauts experience is also pretty nasty.
Thankfully, this will be mostly solvable when we get to building a space elevator. The main reason why they experience the radiation is because you need too much mass to absorb it. So they opted to take a calculated risk of an excessive radiation dose so that the mission would be possible within the technology of the time. A space elevator may not need such restriction.
Well, the big problem is that if they send it up and it explodes in orbit, it's a nasty debris storm and it sucks. And it costs propellant to put it up in orbit, that they'd rather send up something else in.
The other problem is that human time in orbit is incredibly valuable right now. Until we lower the cost per pound to orbit, astronaut time is just too valuable for these sorts of things.
Plus, we don't have the spacesuits nor the tools for that kind of project right now.
The big thing about Tea is that, cup for cup, it has less caffiene than coffee, but it does have caffiene. It also has some other stimulating chemicals and, if brewed for a long time, some other stuff that counteracts the stimulants.
Caffiene is one of those substances where you don't *need* to go cold turkey, you can fade out your caffiene intake over time.
No, White LEDs have two stages. Electricity to Blue/UV in the chip, UV/Blue to White in the phosphors. Except that the mercury-argon arc is more efficent than the LED chip so far at producing Blue/UV light. In both cases, mind you, the base device does produce a certain amount of visible light as well.
LEDs are decent for some single-color applications (although cold-cathode "neon sign" tubing often does just as good of a job), low-voltage, and under some mechanical-shock requirements.
Add to this that LEDs are an order of magnitude harder to manufacture and you start to realize that it's going to be a while before LEDs are worth it.
Also note that the reflector is not a miracle worker. Usually, you want something more than a point source with a very small throw angle if you want illumination. And they can always be integrated into the casing of a flourescent, the same way that some of the existing flourescent ceiling fixtures are.
You are on the right track -- energy really is the ultimate limiting factor -- but solar energy is not as free as you'd like to think.
Solar energy both requires the materials used to collect the energy and the space for the collector.
There's also the problem of weather.
Now, the interesting thing is that the population problem is probably overstated -- population control is working. And we've got enough Uranium and Thorium available in the crust, especially with breeder reactors, for millions of years.
But there's plenty more reasons for why we still need to go into space.
Alternatively, give people the option between fronteer life on Mars/Asteroids/etc. where you can have as many kids as you can support, and a 2 kid max on Earth (although preferebly not enforced the way they do in China).
You do realize that lifters are absolutely useless for real space travel. Electrogravitic? No, just Ion Wind -- same thing as the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze, which also doesn't work as well as the designers claim.;)
You are laboring under the misassumption that all of the space activity is solely built around solving the prize. In fact, the prize is only the first step. The real prize is building a company that operates spaceflight JetBlue-style and/or builds the craft. Bezos is a little late to the game for an X-prize run, so if he doesn't give up partway through, I doubt anybody will know much substantial for another few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah.
Until you accidentally trigger it and get nasty third degree burns like only thermite can provide.
Ahh, but if somebody leaves their laptop chained to a desk with other people, they are more likely to interfere if the person is *obviously* picking it instead of carefully unscrewing their pen.
So there really is a difference because, after all, laptop locks are probably for show anyway.
I just follow the "don't let one's laptop out of sight" strategy. Works well.
Indeed.
I've always felt that anything that uses anything not easily cut with either a dremel or a pair of cable clippers to be really more show than anything else.
Not to say that doesn't help. It's pretty unquestionable to everybody else in the room that the person currently making lots of noise and the characteristic nasty odor of cutting through metal is not the legitimate owner.
Well, either case, you take advantage of Shannon's Limit. As you increase the size of the channel, you reduce the decibels of gain required to get information through.
I think you have things reversed. WiFi uses DSSS and cordless phones use FHSS, from what I was reading.
Now, the one suggested explanation I've seen about 2.4 GHz cordless vs. WiFi is that one device having FHSS and another having DSSS will tend to bring out the worst-case conflict behaviour. It sounds like FHSS doesn't look like the gausian noise that all of the spread-spectrum assumptions are built around to a DSSS radio. It sounds like, however, it's dependent on the exact implementation of FHSS and DSSS.
You wish.
The FCC's regulating just as much as they did before because they are beholden to congressional smack-downs paid for by incumbent broadcasters, their traditional responsibilities, and the potential to look really good by taking people's unused spectrum away and auctioning it off.
There's a big one happening once they get rid of analog TV and get everybody to use HDTV.
Mandating the broadcast flag and wiretapping is but a tiny piece of the FCC's present and future jack-booted thug job.
850 is a synonym for 800, when you are talking about cellular.
Either way, it is the frequencies of 824-849MHz and 869-894MHz. It's just that the GSM folks added a 50 to the 800 to be more precise.
This is why you really need to snicker when Sprint advertizes that they are the "nation's largest all-digital all-PCS network". AT&T and Cingular have some presence on the 850 band. Basicly, Sprint's advertizing that they got to the party late and that they suck. The big thing that AT&T and Cingular have been up to lately is getting rid of TDMA service on the 850 band and using GSM instead.
The big thing is that there's room for 2 providers (A and B, if you ever used an old cell phone) in the 850 band, but there's room for 6 providers in the 1900 band. Part of why it makes sense for AT&T and Cingular to merge is that they will be able to combine their respective 850 bands and will, especially when they get UMTS (which handles the sorts of multipath you find in cities as well as CDMA does and GSM does not) rolled out and potentially give Verizon a run for their money.
Well, other than there being more high frequencies to work with.
I picked up a Panasonic KX-TC1486B from Target a few weeks back.
You know, it's a shame to waste old DEC PDP-10 parts like that. ;)
The cordless phone manufacturers have been playing quite a game over the past decade. They keep trying to get you to upgrade phones to a "higher" megahertz phone because they know that you are already being told by Intel to upgrade your CPU to a "higher" megahertz CPU.
;)
;)
;)
So, here's the thing. It's a general rule that as you go up in megahertz, the ability to penetrate walls goes down. Thus, the higher the megahertz, the lower the effective range. Consumer Reports did some tests here and showed that this carries over to reality. This is also why Verizon Wireless tends to have better reception -- they are primarily on the 850 MHz band instead of the 1900 MHz band.
So what have you gotten by upgrading to an "advanced" 2.4 or 5.8 GHz phone? Less range, although generally enough range to make it around a "normal" house.
Now, in order to produce a device that works in the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz band without a license the FCC requires you to be spread-spectrum.
There's some upsides and downsides here. First, some of the spread-spectrum devices, most notably older ones, didn't use very good spread-spectrum methods.
Second, in *theory* if everything's optimized properly, you can use some number of devices and they will all be perceived as "noise" to all of the other devices. So as you add more functioning devices in general, they will all start to experience interference. The problem is when devices using conflicting spread spectrum techniques are in use.
Third, microwaves and other such RF-heating applications, are covered underneath a different set of FCC rules, which generally are built around not causing your eyeballs to be fried overeasy (your eyeballs are the first thing to suffer damage from microwaves, which is why staring at the microwave window is not the world's brightest idea) Microwaves are supposed to be Faraday cages, but sometimes there's a leak. I'd start to wonder about my Microwave's safety if it started interfering with my WiFi, mind you.
Fourth, if there's interference and undesired performance, you have essentially no recourse. I've been thinking that they really should have allocated a frequency band that's reserved for only devices using a 802.11-standard protocol, but that decision really should have been made a long time ago. Oh, and if you start interfering with something important (That's the "Harmfull Interference" they speak of on the FCC warning on the back of a device) you can and will have government folks knocking on your doorstep. There have been documented cases of equipment interfering with aircraft navigation signals from the ground, which makes the airlines very unhappy and tends to get investigated.
I'm really wondering what the "Wifi-Friendly" cordless phones are actually. Especially given that VTech is the folks who are advertising it. As I've mentioned above, in *theory* any device on the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5.4/5.8 GHz ISM bands (they are actually the same thing) shouldn't prevent each other from working and should just be perceivable as noise Also, *in theory*, one could "do better" by listening for 802.11b/g activity and actively routing around it. This is the big difference between Bluetooth 1.1 and 1.2. But that's more circuitry, so I'm not entirely sure if they are actually doing that, or they just put them in a test lab to see what happens. They'll probably insist that it took years of engineering time and it's a special feature, even if it's more the second.
I personally have just stuck to 900 MHz phones. Like I said, all things being equal, they tend to have longer range. Plus, I figure that having absolutely no interference is better than having a measured amount while the phone is in use.
Sure my WiFi uses 802.11b, which is 2.4 GHz, but there's some darn good reasons for why one should keep 802.11a around.
The main one is that 802.11a is usually faster than 802.11g at close range. So I have a halfassed
Hmmm.. The last time there was another person with the same first name, I decided that I wanted to be the evil one.
Ah, you are probably correct in that aspect -- Tis not a verifiable lie, just a lot of literary dancing around. Funny. But then, that's what getting a lot of emails will cause you to do, I suppose.
Nontheless, I still think that it's awfully hard for them to have thought far enough ahead to realize that girl.com wasn't appropriate but it was OK to direct traffic from an emotionally charged book at somebody's personal page. The point is, there was already a lot of evidence in 2000 that indicated that what they were doing was an incredibly *bad* idea. Maybe I'm just expecting intelligence out of people that's unreasonable, or something.
And, really, it's quite classy of Kathy T to have actually posted some sort of statemnt of appology. I'd love to see if Aftab does a similar gesture...
See, I think there's a limit that some folks have crossed. On one side of the line, there's emailing Katie Jones a letter of encouragement or contacting Penguin and letting them know that they did wrong and wouldn't it be nice if they, albeit 4 years late, tried to do something to make it right. On the other side of the line, there's turning this into your personal vendetta and sending incredibly crude letters to Katie T. Which is really dumb, no matter what planet you're from.
The problem is, the statistics aren't good. Aftab's rebuttal (there's no e at the end), unless she prostrates herself and asks for forgiveness, won't answer anything. When you have an issue regarding a conversation between two people, where there probably isn't any real record of it, there's never a good definitive ending where you can tell who was really telling the truth or not.
I had those sorts of thoughts, however, I tend to believe KJ more.
First, by the year 2000, folks realized that a domain name is something big and that owning any referenced URLs is also important. I mean, this wasn't 1989, before the September That Never Ended, this was 2000. And this isn't the first time that Penguin has tried to pull these sorts of stunts, either. Big companies have *never* had any sort of interest in the little guy and his personal page if said personal page gets in their way.
Second, in the only statements that have been made by Katie T about the issue, verifiable lies were said. Like Katie T trying to claim that she's not associated with Aftab, yet there being links on her page to Aftab.
I mean, the problem is, no matter how you dice it, Penguin did wrong. It's public record that her domain name was registered in 1996 and the book came out in 2000.
See, that's interesting.
If you check out Katiesplace.org, you see Katie T, and Parry Aftab's name promenantly.
If you check out Katie T's projects page, she also mentions Parry Aftab as being part of these projects.
If you check out Parry's blog, she talks about katiesplace.com being a collaboration between her and Katie T.
Nope. Sounds like Parry is working with Katie T to me, as shown by publicly available information on the pages "controlled" by the respective folks. Thus, Katie Jones still has the story with more easily verifiable truth to it.
From my nobody-knows-about-it list:* EOS -- Before SimCity came out, there was EOS. Your job, as a player, is to shape the space program to build space stations, colonies, moon bases, etc. (Apple II series is all I've ever heard of it being for)
* Neuromancer -- Back when they were going to make a movie for Neuromancer (but before Gibson realized that one shouldn't sell movie rights to a pair of cabana boys) they made a tie-in game. Doesn't really feel like the book and is, in a real sense, a little too funny, but still amusing to play. People give me weird looks when I make reference to sleeping in a plate of spagetti. (Apple II, Apple IIgs, Amiga, etc)
* Sky Kid -- Underrated NES game.
* QIX -- Suddenly one of the Xscreensavers makes sense.
* Tradewars 2002 -- Classic BBS game, from back in the days.
I agree that the radiation that the Apollo crews experienced was pretty nasty. The continuous doses that the low earth orbit astronauts experience is also pretty nasty.
Thankfully, this will be mostly solvable when we get to building a space elevator. The main reason why they experience the radiation is because you need too much mass to absorb it. So they opted to take a calculated risk of an excessive radiation dose so that the mission would be possible within the technology of the time. A space elevator may not need such restriction.
Well, the big problem is that if they send it up and it explodes in orbit, it's a nasty debris storm and it sucks. And it costs propellant to put it up in orbit, that they'd rather send up something else in.
The other problem is that human time in orbit is incredibly valuable right now. Until we lower the cost per pound to orbit, astronaut time is just too valuable for these sorts of things.
Plus, we don't have the spacesuits nor the tools for that kind of project right now.
It's no more or less shielded than Apollo.
Basicly, the radiation dosage is small enough that you can do it once without any major side effects.
They call that an "Oral Fixation", heh heh.
The big thing about Tea is that, cup for cup, it has less caffiene than coffee, but it does have caffiene. It also has some other stimulating chemicals and, if brewed for a long time, some other stuff that counteracts the stimulants.
Caffiene is one of those substances where you don't *need* to go cold turkey, you can fade out your caffiene intake over time.
And not to mention, continuous use of sleeping pills cause your body to "expect" to have a depressant in order to sleep.
Same reason why folks are lethargic when you've secretly replaced their coffee with decaf....
No, White LEDs have two stages. Electricity to Blue/UV in the chip, UV/Blue to White in the phosphors. Except that the mercury-argon arc is more efficent than the LED chip so far at producing Blue/UV light. In both cases, mind you, the base device does produce a certain amount of visible light as well.
LEDs are decent for some single-color applications (although cold-cathode "neon sign" tubing often does just as good of a job), low-voltage, and under some mechanical-shock requirements.
Add to this that LEDs are an order of magnitude harder to manufacture and you start to realize that it's going to be a while before LEDs are worth it.
Also note that the reflector is not a miracle worker. Usually, you want something more than a point source with a very small throw angle if you want illumination. And they can always be integrated into the casing of a flourescent, the same way that some of the existing flourescent ceiling fixtures are.
You are on the right track -- energy really is the ultimate limiting factor -- but solar energy is not as free as you'd like to think.
Solar energy both requires the materials used to collect the energy and the space for the collector.
There's also the problem of weather.
Now, the interesting thing is that the population problem is probably overstated -- population control is working. And we've got enough Uranium and Thorium available in the crust, especially with breeder reactors, for millions of years.
But there's plenty more reasons for why we still need to go into space.
Alternatively, give people the option between fronteer life on Mars/Asteroids/etc. where you can have as many kids as you can support, and a 2 kid max on Earth (although preferebly not enforced the way they do in China).
You do realize that lifters are absolutely useless for real space travel. Electrogravitic? No, just Ion Wind -- same thing as the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze, which also doesn't work as well as the designers claim. ;)
You are laboring under the misassumption that all of the space activity is solely built around solving the prize. In fact, the prize is only the first step. The real prize is building a company that operates spaceflight JetBlue-style and/or builds the craft. Bezos is a little late to the game for an X-prize run, so if he doesn't give up partway through, I doubt anybody will know much substantial for another few years.
Ahh, but a compact flourescent is still more efficent than an LED.