Living on the folks dairy farm at the time had its advantages (I was out of high school five years by that time). We were having a very warm January (much like this year) and after the morning chores were done I was trying to perfect a stacked pair of 11 element yagis on 2m (146 MHz). I went into my ham shack and heard some guys talking on 40m (7 MHz) about the shuttle blowing up. I couldn't believe it so I turned on the TV and there was Dan Rather providing the terrible news and that unforgettable video.
I recall watching the CBS Morning Show (Harry Smith and Paula Zahn) the remainder of the week for news updates and the show was being broadcast out of Miami, FL that week. Their musical guest for that week was a "new" group called the Miami Sound Machine. Whenever I hear Gloria Estefan sing "...everbody do the conga!" I am haunted by the Challenger images.
BTW, I never did get that stack working. I think I had the coax lengths all wrong.:-(
Point taken, but this is obviously a Dell service issue and for them to imply that it is an FCC rules thing is blatantly false. The FCC rules simply don't care about issues such as delicate antenna connectors. If they are going to invoke FCC rules, then I'd like to see what part and section they are refering to.
In my experience the HAL blob does not appear to be kernel specific. The module wrapper which interacts directly with the kernel may have version dependencies. Check out the MadWifi HAL FAQ which should answer most of your questions.
I wouldn't put it past Dell to shill their own service personnel for probably several legitimate and some specious reasons. However, if there were really such a restriction, then Linksys, D-Link, et. al. would have similar warnings in their product documentation and the stores wouldn't be able to sell the devices to anyone without requiring supervised installation.
The product documentation of my Linksys A/B/G card is mute on the issue of FCC rules (I checked). Also, if an FCC certified technician were required, then a lot of people would have been cited for improper installation of millions of wireless APs at home an in businesses by now. If this requirement really existed, then I, as an FCC licensed technician (General Radio Operators License (GROL) seperate and distinct from my Amateur Radio Operators license), my phone would have been ringing off the hook from headhunters over the past few years. That hasn't happened.
Since A/B/G devices all operate under Part 15 and since the devices are designed and sold as consumer electronics devices, the FCC's approval process for sale of the devices removes the need for an FCC certified tech to do the installation.
I can understand Dell putting the warning in there for warranty purposes. For any other reason they are distorting reality.
IMHO, the page you've linked to is interesting from a manufacturers perspective, but for a user simply installing a pre-approved device into a laptop it is largely meaningless.
Actually, it's not just US companies that are bound by the FCC regulations--any company wanting to sell a device with a radio transmitter in the US must go through the FCC approval process regardless of where they're located. This goes for transmitters intended for any FCC regulated radio service even Amateur Radio where the major manufacturers must submit the models for approval.
As for FCC Certified techs doing installations, I know of no such requirement. Now, installations must meet FCC regulations regardless of service, but the requirement of holding an FCC license to do so is limited to very few well defined (in the FCC rules) areas. Anyone may perform an installation and maintenance of a radio transmitter for most services these days, but this does not excuse rules compliance.
I have two Atheros devices, one a Linksys WPC55AG PCMCIA card and the other is the wireless chipset in a Thinkpad T42. Both are supported fully (except for the LED on the T42, but that's no big deal) and well by the Madwifi project.
Some will argue that the HAL (firmware blob) makes the whole works non-free which is true as far as Debian is concerned. The madwifi-source package is in Sid's non-free section now. Using the module-assistant package makes building the ath modules a trivial matter. Both of my machines work well with udev and wpa_supplicant.
Much of the non-free nature of wireless can be attributed to regulations like the US FCC's Part 15. Approval for sale requires that the radio power and frequency cannot be easily tampered with. Given that the Atheros chipset is a broadband Software Defined Radio (SDR), the firmware blob must remain closed to meet the Part 15 regulations. Really, I see little functional difference between a firmware blob occupying main memory and the same code on the card. The interface is defined and the driver GPL, so I don't quite understand the Kernel's complaint when loading the module.
As much as the drivers, the general user interface to wireless control could use a vast improvement over what I've seen so far. This is one area where XP has the lead for end users. I do expect that this remaining piece of the laptop puzzle will be addressed this year. It appears this may be on the docket for KDE 4.
Absolutely agreed! On the Linux systems I have Helvetica is a non-anti aliased font and looks hideously ragged. I have had to do some configuration contortions to substitute Arial for Helvetica. Yet, there are so many "web designers" that specify Helvetica as the favored sans serif font. Why not just follow the W3C recommendations and specify "sans serif" rather than specific font faces? It should be up to the user agent to pick the favored font that best matches the user's viewing preference. Oh, I forgot. Doing so would not allow the "web designers vision to reach it's full expression." Baaah!!
Because, for the past forty to fifty years there has been a concerted effort on the part of a political/social idealogy to teach people the entitlement mantra and it has worked. Americans are told from birth that they are entitled to all sorts of material things. Yet, the education of the true entitlement of a citizen of the United States is withheld as it contradicts the entitlement indoctrination. It is in this climate that the last hold on individual liberty--private property rights--was removed by the US Supreme Court on June 23, 2005.
Sadly, our aerable land is getting taken out of production at an alrming rate due to urban sprawl. Now, I don't begrudge anyone wanting to own their own home, but when I can go to any of the medium-sized cities within a few hours drive of here and visibly see urban development where a decade ago crops and livestock were raised, I get alarmed.
At some point something is going to have to give. Either there will be legal restrictions put in place on the type and amount of aerable land a community will allow development to take or modern agricultural production will not be able to keep pace with the population growth.
On the occasion that I listen to some of the local Hitz stations fed by satellite programming, the dee-jays have this annoying habit of rarely mentioning the name of the song after it's finished although they occasionally mention the artist at the beginning of the song. Mind you, there is isn't much modern music that appeals to my ears these days, but it would be nice to at least know who did that cover of an older song I recognize.
Just like Amazon has never gotten a penny of my money due to their stupid patents from some years back, the RIAA hasn't gotten any of my money since they've really started acting stupid. But then I'm old enough that having the latest hit on an iPod isn't the most important thing in life anymore.;-)
I was working underneath a tractor Thursday afternoon and answered a call to see that the LCD was destroyed. This is the first one I've lost this way. My original cell phone was run over by a truck. I could still read the display on that one, but the RF section was broken. I was a half mile from the tower and had no service.
A flexible LCD would've survived getting caught between me and a rock. Off to the cell store I go!
I don't think the parent was talking about a MIME link to open OpenOffic.org, but rather Firefox actually rendering an ODF file itself. After all, ODF is just XML with a custom DTD. What it would take for Firefox to read that would be support for the DTD and displaying spreadsheet cells as table elements, etc.
Firefox would be an ODF reader that could also print ODF. It has little to do with OOo. While ODF and OOo have an historical relationship, implementing ODF is not dependent on OOo.
This is probably the most reasonable explanation I've read on this topic.
It's probably impossible for any researcher not to gain an emotional involvement with their research over time. The problem as I see it is that if the experiment is of one's own biology, then that person is in danger of doing things to allow the experiment to survive which may not necessarily be in the best interests of the research.
Now, as to the poor doc. Had he stopped this when he first learned about it, I'd bet that he'd still be relatively unknown and his research would have continued nearly uninterrupted. Now that he did the coverup/resign routine, he's famous. Any bets on how soon his book comes out?
I can appreciate the count of "failed" and abandoned projects on SourceForge. By and large, they can be resurrected by anyone willing to do so. The open source world is not unique in this respect as there are probably thousands of shareware and freeware (not to mention commercial) programs that have been adandoned just since Win32 hit the street, not to mention since DOS hit the street. The critical difference is that in the majority of cases when a shareware or small commercial developer closes shop, the users are left with little recourse for further support.
At least F/OS Software is never truly dead. It may enter a state of dormancy or being a zombie, but it can always be brought back to life by anyone interested in doing so.
Egads! I forgot about OS/2 2.1. I bought it in early '96 after reading some hype on it and tried running it on my AMD 386/40. Needless to say it was quite a bit slower than Win 3.11 and I really couldn't do much with it as I don't think it had the Windows integration completed at that point. It gave up its partition for my first Slackware (3.0!) install later that summer.
We had some old OS/2 boxes at work up until a few years ago that ran PM 1.3. Asside from obsolete hardware, they ran fine and with little trouble. OS/2--stability that WinNT through XP wishes it could match.
Don't be fooled, Linux has a long way to go before being a drop-in replacement for Windows on the desktop.
In our organization with its reliance on Lotus notes, that would be true. Most everything else here has become a web app and Firefox handles that just fine. Then there is the mainframe access and so far I've not seen a Linux equivalent for Attachmate.
Windows is a 64 bit kludge to a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
I remember that kludge that was Win32s. It saved me buying Win95 for about 18 months, but it finally got to the point where all the cool stuff required '95. I finally jumped into that mess in mid '97 and six months later I went to Linux full time.
Ahhh, Free Cell. I could beat it with some regularity. I found a card game (maybe from MS back in the day?) called Cruel. It lived up to its name...
Sounds like an enlightened IT dept. I'm afraid ours would just get out the checkbook. When you're spending a few mil per locomotive, what's 10 grand to replace last year's server, especially if you can charge it to someone else's budget?
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And, just to bolster your argument, further proof is the election of Clinton to two terms prior to Bush. Morons indeed.
Living on the folks dairy farm at the time had its advantages (I was out of high school five years by that time). We were having a very warm January (much like this year) and after the morning chores were done I was trying to perfect a stacked pair of 11 element yagis on 2m (146 MHz). I went into my ham shack and heard some guys talking on 40m (7 MHz) about the shuttle blowing up. I couldn't believe it so I turned on the TV and there was Dan Rather providing the terrible news and that unforgettable video.
:-(
I recall watching the CBS Morning Show (Harry Smith and Paula Zahn) the remainder of the week for news updates and the show was being broadcast out of Miami, FL that week. Their musical guest for that week was a "new" group called the Miami Sound Machine. Whenever I hear Gloria Estefan sing "...everbody do the conga!" I am haunted by the Challenger images.
BTW, I never did get that stack working. I think I had the coax lengths all wrong.
Point taken, but this is obviously a Dell service issue and for them to imply that it is an FCC rules thing is blatantly false. The FCC rules simply don't care about issues such as delicate antenna connectors. If they are going to invoke FCC rules, then I'd like to see what part and section they are refering to.
In my experience the HAL blob does not appear to be kernel specific. The module wrapper which interacts directly with the kernel may have version dependencies. Check out the MadWifi HAL FAQ which should answer most of your questions.
I wouldn't put it past Dell to shill their own service personnel for probably several legitimate and some specious reasons. However, if there were really such a restriction, then Linksys, D-Link, et. al. would have similar warnings in their product documentation and the stores wouldn't be able to sell the devices to anyone without requiring supervised installation.
The product documentation of my Linksys A/B/G card is mute on the issue of FCC rules (I checked). Also, if an FCC certified technician were required, then a lot of people would have been cited for improper installation of millions of wireless APs at home an in businesses by now. If this requirement really existed, then I, as an FCC licensed technician (General Radio Operators License (GROL) seperate and distinct from my Amateur Radio Operators license), my phone would have been ringing off the hook from headhunters over the past few years. That hasn't happened.
Since A/B/G devices all operate under Part 15 and since the devices are designed and sold as consumer electronics devices, the FCC's approval process for sale of the devices removes the need for an FCC certified tech to do the installation.
I can understand Dell putting the warning in there for warranty purposes. For any other reason they are distorting reality.
IMHO, the page you've linked to is interesting from a manufacturers perspective, but for a user simply installing a pre-approved device into a laptop it is largely meaningless.
Actually, it's not just US companies that are bound by the FCC regulations--any company wanting to sell a device with a radio transmitter in the US must go through the FCC approval process regardless of where they're located. This goes for transmitters intended for any FCC regulated radio service even Amateur Radio where the major manufacturers must submit the models for approval.
As for FCC Certified techs doing installations, I know of no such requirement. Now, installations must meet FCC regulations regardless of service, but the requirement of holding an FCC license to do so is limited to very few well defined (in the FCC rules) areas. Anyone may perform an installation and maintenance of a radio transmitter for most services these days, but this does not excuse rules compliance.
I have two Atheros devices, one a Linksys WPC55AG PCMCIA card and the other is the wireless chipset in a Thinkpad T42. Both are supported fully (except for the LED on the T42, but that's no big deal) and well by the Madwifi project.
Some will argue that the HAL (firmware blob) makes the whole works non-free which is true as far as Debian is concerned. The madwifi-source package is in Sid's non-free section now. Using the module-assistant package makes building the ath modules a trivial matter. Both of my machines work well with udev and wpa_supplicant.
Much of the non-free nature of wireless can be attributed to regulations like the US FCC's Part 15. Approval for sale requires that the radio power and frequency cannot be easily tampered with. Given that the Atheros chipset is a broadband Software Defined Radio (SDR), the firmware blob must remain closed to meet the Part 15 regulations. Really, I see little functional difference between a firmware blob occupying main memory and the same code on the card. The interface is defined and the driver GPL, so I don't quite understand the Kernel's complaint when loading the module.
As much as the drivers, the general user interface to wireless control could use a vast improvement over what I've seen so far. This is one area where XP has the lead for end users. I do expect that this remaining piece of the laptop puzzle will be addressed this year. It appears this may be on the docket for KDE 4.
I've come to like Akregator which is part of KDE. I tried a few others and this is the one I've settled on.
Salt Lake City charges according to a co-worker I was in class with and the airport's advertisements overlaid on CNN Airport.
I didn't bother to check out Denver or Lincoln, NE (doubtful).
Absolutely agreed! On the Linux systems I have Helvetica is a non-anti aliased font and looks hideously ragged. I have had to do some configuration contortions to substitute Arial for Helvetica. Yet, there are so many "web designers" that specify Helvetica as the favored sans serif font. Why not just follow the W3C recommendations and specify "sans serif" rather than specific font faces? It should be up to the user agent to pick the favored font that best matches the user's viewing preference. Oh, I forgot. Doing so would not allow the "web designers vision to reach it's full expression." Baaah!!
Let the users decide!!
Because, for the past forty to fifty years there has been a concerted effort on the part of a political/social idealogy to teach people the entitlement mantra and it has worked. Americans are told from birth that they are entitled to all sorts of material things. Yet, the education of the true entitlement of a citizen of the United States is withheld as it contradicts the entitlement indoctrination. It is in this climate that the last hold on individual liberty--private property rights--was removed by the US Supreme Court on June 23, 2005.
Sadly, our aerable land is getting taken out of production at an alrming rate due to urban sprawl. Now, I don't begrudge anyone wanting to own their own home, but when I can go to any of the medium-sized cities within a few hours drive of here and visibly see urban development where a decade ago crops and livestock were raised, I get alarmed.
At some point something is going to have to give. Either there will be legal restrictions put in place on the type and amount of aerable land a community will allow development to take or modern agricultural production will not be able to keep pace with the population growth.
Hmmmm, perhaps this is how they want to keep Joe Public from knowing the actual lyrics to the latest "cop killer" rap album.
Excellent point.
;-)
On the occasion that I listen to some of the local Hitz stations fed by satellite programming, the dee-jays have this annoying habit of rarely mentioning the name of the song after it's finished although they occasionally mention the artist at the beginning of the song. Mind you, there is isn't much modern music that appeals to my ears these days, but it would be nice to at least know who did that cover of an older song I recognize.
Just like Amazon has never gotten a penny of my money due to their stupid patents from some years back, the RIAA hasn't gotten any of my money since they've really started acting stupid. But then I'm old enough that having the latest hit on an iPod isn't the most important thing in life anymore.
But, can you write them back in Wordperfect 5.1 format and have Wordperfect 5.1 be able to open the files without error?
I was working underneath a tractor Thursday afternoon and answered a call to see that the LCD was destroyed. This is the first one I've lost this way. My original cell phone was run over by a truck. I could still read the display on that one, but the RF section was broken. I was a half mile from the tower and had no service.
A flexible LCD would've survived getting caught between me and a rock. Off to the cell store I go!
So, did the bank admin then do the proper thing and wipe W2k off the machines and install Linux?
I don't think the parent was talking about a MIME link to open OpenOffic.org, but rather Firefox actually rendering an ODF file itself. After all, ODF is just XML with a custom DTD. What it would take for Firefox to read that would be support for the DTD and displaying spreadsheet cells as table elements, etc.
Firefox would be an ODF reader that could also print ODF. It has little to do with OOo. While ODF and OOo have an historical relationship, implementing ODF is not dependent on OOo.
This is probably the most reasonable explanation I've read on this topic.
It's probably impossible for any researcher not to gain an emotional involvement with their research over time. The problem as I see it is that if the experiment is of one's own biology, then that person is in danger of doing things to allow the experiment to survive which may not necessarily be in the best interests of the research.
Now, as to the poor doc. Had he stopped this when he first learned about it, I'd bet that he'd still be relatively unknown and his research would have continued nearly uninterrupted. Now that he did the coverup/resign routine, he's famous. Any bets on how soon his book comes out?
I can appreciate the count of "failed" and abandoned projects on SourceForge. By and large, they can be resurrected by anyone willing to do so. The open source world is not unique in this respect as there are probably thousands of shareware and freeware (not to mention commercial) programs that have been adandoned just since Win32 hit the street, not to mention since DOS hit the street. The critical difference is that in the majority of cases when a shareware or small commercial developer closes shop, the users are left with little recourse for further support.
At least F/OS Software is never truly dead. It may enter a state of dormancy or being a zombie, but it can always be brought back to life by anyone interested in doing so.
Egads! I forgot about OS/2 2.1. I bought it in early '96 after reading some hype on it and tried running it on my AMD 386/40. Needless to say it was quite a bit slower than Win 3.11 and I really couldn't do much with it as I don't think it had the Windows integration completed at that point. It gave up its partition for my first Slackware (3.0!) install later that summer.
We had some old OS/2 boxes at work up until a few years ago that ran PM 1.3. Asside from obsolete hardware, they ran fine and with little trouble. OS/2--stability that WinNT through XP wishes it could match.
Don't be fooled, Linux has a long way to go before being a drop-in replacement for Windows on the desktop.
In our organization with its reliance on Lotus notes, that would be true. Most everything else here has become a web app and Firefox handles that just fine. Then there is the mainframe access and so far I've not seen a Linux equivalent for Attachmate.
Windows is a 64 bit kludge to a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
Oh man!
I remember that kludge that was Win32s. It saved me buying Win95 for about 18 months, but it finally got to the point where all the cool stuff required '95. I finally jumped into that mess in mid '97 and six months later I went to Linux full time.
Ahhh, Free Cell. I could beat it with some regularity. I found a card game (maybe from MS back in the day?) called Cruel. It lived up to its name...
Sounds like an enlightened IT dept. I'm afraid ours would just get out the checkbook. When you're spending a few mil per locomotive, what's 10 grand to replace last year's server, especially if you can charge it to someone else's budget?