Legal IF you keep it within the 2.4GHz band. The mod he is using makes it walk all over the spectrum, i.e. all the increased power goes into sidebands. Interfering with other bands is most definately NOT legal -- that's why we have FCC certification of devices (including PCs), to make sure they don't interfere with other devices.
He's not a God, but he's damn close to a blithering idiot! Granted, he looks good by comparison Pournelle, Dvorak, or Katz, but he still a shameless self-promoter tring to make a quick buck by pretending to understand technology he's actually clueless about. AND I'll beleive this "bank shot" actually works when I see it in operation myself. 2.4GHz is the resonant frequency of water (that's why it's the frequency used by microwave ovens) in other words, ANY moisture in the area effectively absorbs any power radiated. 2.4GHz simply DOES NOT WORK RELIABLY for outdoor communication; that's why the band is still available.
Re:I hate to rain on Mr Cringely's parade, but...
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According to this article he's not "obeying all laws, rules, regulations" and his signal is not staying within the 2.4GHz band. Granted, if nobody notices the interference and complains, this is a big "so what"
Re: I hate to rain on Mr Cringely's parade, but...
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Cringely's Bank Shot
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· Score: 1
According to this article the linksys mod is "violating FCC regulations". Granted, the principle "No harm, no foul" probably applies here, meaning if nobody notices the interference, it's probably ok. But the point is that Cringely never bothered to check if it was interfering, did he?
Re:I hate to rain on Mr Cringely's parade, but...
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Cringely's Bank Shot
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supernova87a is trying to make the same point I was; his choice of the term "souped up repeater" was a mistake. The only objectionable part of this scheme is the Linksys WAP11 mod, which according to this articleAfter the "100mW Hack" was applied, we notice a drastic difference. Instead of taking a mere 22MHz, it gobbles up the entire band. Not only did this kill throughput on other AP's in our tests, it entered into the ham band on the left of the dial, and MMDS on the right of the dial. If the WAP11 was moved from channel 6 to channel 1 or 11, this would make the problem even worse. Also, nasty spurs and harmonics were detected in random locations from 1.4GHz to 2.8GHz...
Besides violating FCC regulations, a lot of the WAP11's power is wasted when it is scattered all over the band. Idealy, we would want as much energy as possible in our main carrier.
The point being, the modified WAP11 is walking all over the spectrum, interfering with ham and MMDS! Also, if bi-directional communication is your goal, increasing transmit power on one end accomplishes nothing! The 802.11 transmitter on the other end is still low power; it does you no good if it can receive your signal but you can't receive it's signal!
Cringley is admitting to violating FCC regulations, tresspassing, and theft of service -- all of which are crimes. Of them, the FCC violations will get him into the most trouble. The FCC doesn't like to crack down on people, but when they do, it's generally a minimum of a $10,000 fine.
Did YOU read the following paragraph from Cringely's original article, moron?
From the treetop, I could log-in to my home network and also into Sonic.net. Using both double yagis at the same time did increase total signal strength and made the installation stronger, too, since I could attach both yagis to the tree and to each other with large cable ties. The complete system, for those taking notes, involved a Linksys WAP11 access point at my house that had been reprogrammed to operate at a full 100 milliwatts. Connected to the Linksys was a Cushcraft 21 dB parabolic mesh dish antenna. The dish was aimed at the ganged jagis attached to the oak tree on Bennett Mountain, which were aimed in turn into the Sonic.net 802.11b coverage area in downtown Santa Rosa, approximately five miles away.
What part of the word "passive" do you not understand? Basically it's two cheap directional antennas hooked up back-to-back to "bend" the directional beam.
You've just admitted in print that your using a WAP11 Linksys transmitter illegally modified to 100 milliwatts, which also causes it to walk all over the spectrum around it. Don't be suprised if you see a white van parked next to your house -- that's the FCC monitoring your transmissions, and in a short while they'll slap you with a $10,000 fine. Yah, you're REAL SMART Cringely!
Here's an idea: why not just charge customers for the bandwidth they actually use? Makes a lot more sense then worrying about how many nodes are behind that NAT firewall, doesn't it? Damn right I run NAT in my ISDN router! I have 6 computers and home, and I still can only type on 1 of them at a time!
Plus, one user running a constant audio/video stream is going to use a lot more bandwidth than 100 neighbors intermittently jumping onto my AirPort to check their email. This sounds like yet another case of a solution in search of a problem trying to sell itself.
Speaking of tragedy of the commons, although ideas (Intellectual Property) are not subject to this rule (other people's use of my ideas diminishes my own potential for use not one bit) the BANDWIDTH of the Internet IS finite and thus subject to the tragedy of the commons. The economic structure of the internet, wherein everyone pays only for an access point, and pays the same amount regardless of how much traffic they generate, is doomed to failure! SPAM, DOS attacks, script kiddies, and the current uselessness of voice over IP or videoconferencing over the Internet are all side effects of this flawed economic model. The Internet must adopt some form of pay-per-bit in order to survive. Granted, this could be handled by segregating traffic by Quality of Service and having no fees for lowest QoS, but eventually some form of making users pay proportional to the bandwidth they use must be adopted.
Actually, region coding has resulted in the wide availability of DVD decks altered defeat region coding (and Macrovision) in Europe and Australia. (Although it seem Phase II DVDs are designed to make this impossible by requiring the drive itself to enforce region coding, not the DVD player firmware).
If your own alternatives are to pay a 1 billion dollar fine or to pay a 10 billion dollar fine, you'd probably be pretty happy to pay a 1 billion dollar fine. Put another way, every time Ballmer says something stupid the market capitalization of MSFT drops more than 1 billion dollars in a single day, but nobody fired him yet!
We need access to the M$ source because the market realities dictate that for any new OS to be accepted, it must be backwards compatible with older OSes that customers already have a huge software investment with. In other words, I won't buy an OS if I can't run my old DOS games on it. As the WINE folks have discovered, being backwards compatible with code from a company that deliberately obfuscates it's code and uses hidden APIs for it's own applications is not easy -- in fact, I don't think any of Microsoft's releases have ever acheived perfect backwards compatibility with their previous releases!
I've thought about this myself. By tracking both ends of the wand in 3 dimensions, it is possible to implement a joystick with 5 degrees of freedom (unfortunatly detecting rotations about the axis of the wand seems difficult to me). Be great for games, not sure how usefull it would be for office work.
All six of my computers at home are using touch pads. Even track balls are marginally more effective than mice. Alternatively, a device I dreamed up years ago (wear a reflective dot somewhere on your person and have an infra-red light emitter/detector track it in 2D)has actually been patented and is being sold by some company -- after everybody laughed at me for suggesting it. The "straw" pointing device (a cylinder that could turn for y-axis or slide side to side for x-axis) has never caught on.
But I think you're right; what I really want to see is a 3D device, not everybody trying to improve on the 2D paradigm. Of course, that means existing drivers and existing operating systems would need to be abandoned.
These backdoor keys could bankrupt a company if disclosed to the wrong person. Would you trust the FBI, who recently admitted to losing hundreds of firearms and laptop computers, with YOUR key?
Why not ban Pink Floyd's Good Bye Blue Sky while they're at it?
[ Look, Mummy... There's an airplane up in the sky!]
Did you, did you see the frightened ones?
Did you, did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter,
When the promise of a brave new world,
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?
Did you, did you see the frightened ones?
Did you, did you hear the falling bombs?
The flames are all long gone,
But the pain lingers on.
Goodbye, blue sky.
Goodbye, blue sky.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Clear channel is deeply in bed with the RIAA, and theirs stations ALL operate off of narrow play lists, which means anybody with any taste or any preference for variety wasn't listening to them anyway.
Heaven knows I was already boycotting them, but it would still be nice to see a definitive list of thier stations, so I be sure not to listen to them!
From what I heard, since Eros passes close to both the Earth and Mars, either is capable of perturbing it's orbit, so it's orbit is semi-chaotic. What this means is that they can't predict the orbit too far into the future, so that in a few million years, the orbit MIGHT cross that of Earth... No, there is no danger of it hitting the Earth in our lifetimes.
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Legal IF you keep it within the 2.4GHz band. The mod he is using makes it walk all over the spectrum, i.e. all the increased power goes into sidebands. Interfering with other bands is most definately NOT legal -- that's why we have FCC certification of devices (including PCs), to make sure they don't interfere with other devices.
He's not a God, but he's damn close to a blithering idiot! Granted, he looks good by comparison Pournelle, Dvorak, or Katz, but he still a shameless self-promoter tring to make a quick buck by pretending to understand technology he's actually clueless about. AND I'll beleive this "bank shot" actually works when I see it in operation myself. 2.4GHz is the resonant frequency of water (that's why it's the frequency used by microwave ovens) in other words, ANY moisture in the area effectively absorbs any power radiated. 2.4GHz simply DOES NOT WORK RELIABLY for outdoor communication; that's why the band is still available.
According to this article he's not "obeying all laws, rules, regulations" and his signal is not staying within the 2.4GHz band. Granted, if nobody notices the interference and complains, this is a big "so what"
According to this article the linksys mod is "violating FCC regulations". Granted, the principle "No harm, no foul" probably applies here, meaning if nobody notices the interference, it's probably ok. But the point is that Cringely never bothered to check if it was interfering, did he?
Besides violating FCC regulations, a lot of the WAP11's power is wasted when it is scattered all over the band. Idealy, we would want as much energy as possible in our main carrier.
The point being, the modified WAP11 is walking all over the spectrum, interfering with ham and MMDS! Also, if bi-directional communication is your goal, increasing transmit power on one end accomplishes nothing! The 802.11 transmitter on the other end is still low power; it does you no good if it can receive your signal but you can't receive it's signal!
Cringley is admitting to violating FCC regulations, tresspassing, and theft of service -- all of which are crimes. Of them, the FCC violations will get him into the most trouble. The FCC doesn't like to crack down on people, but when they do, it's generally a minimum of a $10,000 fine.
From the treetop, I could log-in to my home network and also into Sonic.net. Using both double yagis at the same time did increase total signal strength and made the installation stronger, too, since I could attach both yagis to the tree and to each other with large cable ties. The complete system, for those taking notes, involved a Linksys WAP11 access point at my house that had been reprogrammed to operate at a full 100 milliwatts. Connected to the Linksys was a Cushcraft 21 dB parabolic mesh dish antenna. The dish was aimed at the ganged jagis attached to the oak tree on Bennett Mountain, which were aimed in turn into the Sonic.net 802.11b coverage area in downtown Santa Rosa, approximately five miles away.
What part of the word "passive" do you not understand? Basically it's two cheap directional antennas hooked up back-to-back to "bend" the directional beam.
Has Cringely read this article which basically says the hack he's using to increase his Linksys WAP11 power output DOES NOT WORK?
You've just admitted in print that your using a WAP11 Linksys transmitter illegally modified to 100 milliwatts, which also causes it to walk all over the spectrum around it. Don't be suprised if you see a white van parked next to your house -- that's the FCC monitoring your transmissions, and in a short while they'll slap you with a $10,000 fine. Yah, you're REAL SMART Cringely!
Plus, one user running a constant audio/video stream is going to use a lot more bandwidth than 100 neighbors intermittently jumping onto my AirPort to check their email. This sounds like yet another case of a solution in search of a problem trying to sell itself.
Speaking of tragedy of the commons, although ideas (Intellectual Property) are not subject to this rule (other people's use of my ideas diminishes my own potential for use not one bit) the BANDWIDTH of the Internet IS finite and thus subject to the tragedy of the commons. The economic structure of the internet, wherein everyone pays only for an access point, and pays the same amount regardless of how much traffic they generate, is doomed to failure! SPAM, DOS attacks, script kiddies, and the current uselessness of voice over IP or videoconferencing over the Internet are all side effects of this flawed economic model. The Internet must adopt some form of pay-per-bit in order to survive. Granted, this could be handled by segregating traffic by Quality of Service and having no fees for lowest QoS, but eventually some form of making users pay proportional to the bandwidth they use must be adopted.
Actually, region coding has resulted in the wide availability of DVD decks altered defeat region coding (and Macrovision) in Europe and Australia. (Although it seem Phase II DVDs are designed to make this impossible by requiring the drive itself to enforce region coding, not the DVD player firmware).
If your own alternatives are to pay a 1 billion dollar fine or to pay a 10 billion dollar fine, you'd probably be pretty happy to pay a 1 billion dollar fine. Put another way, every time Ballmer says something stupid the market capitalization of MSFT drops more than 1 billion dollars in a single day, but nobody fired him yet!
We need access to the M$ source because the market realities dictate that for any new OS to be accepted, it must be backwards compatible with older OSes that customers already have a huge software investment with. In other words, I won't buy an OS if I can't run my old DOS games on it. As the WINE folks have discovered, being backwards compatible with code from a company that deliberately obfuscates it's code and uses hidden APIs for it's own applications is not easy -- in fact, I don't think any of Microsoft's releases have ever acheived perfect backwards compatibility with their previous releases!
I've thought about this myself. By tracking both ends of the wand in 3 dimensions, it is possible to implement a joystick with 5 degrees of freedom (unfortunatly detecting rotations about the axis of the wand seems difficult to me). Be great for games, not sure how usefull it would be for office work.
But I think you're right; what I really want to see is a 3D device, not everybody trying to improve on the 2D paradigm. Of course, that means existing drivers and existing operating systems would need to be abandoned.
So, in other words, Microsofts vision for the future is an operating system that's even MORE susceptable to virii and worms?!?
The FBI just admitted to "misplacing" hundreds of weapons and laptop computers. What's to keep them from "misplacing" my key?
These backdoor keys could bankrupt a company if disclosed to the wrong person. Would you trust the FBI, who recently admitted to losing hundreds of firearms and laptop computers, with YOUR key?
Heaven knows I was already boycotting them, but it would still be nice to see a definitive list of thier stations, so I be sure not to listen to them!
From what I heard, since Eros passes close to both the Earth and Mars, either is capable of perturbing it's orbit, so it's orbit is semi-chaotic. What this means is that they can't predict the orbit too far into the future, so that in a few million years, the orbit MIGHT cross that of Earth... No, there is no danger of it hitting the Earth in our lifetimes.
One question: How does it handle heat disipation without a fan? Seems to me that touchpad's gonna get a little warm, isn't it?
Concentrate on phasing in Linux/BSD on those platforms that don't effect the interface presented to the average user, i.e. servers, first!