I'd be interested in getting this thing netbooted. Hooking up a HD looks like too much expense and trouble for a $100 device. I know I could get it working with PLIP, but based on my past experience with it (slow, interrupt hell), I'd prefer to use the USB port for connectivity.
Does anyone know of a way to do a PPP-kinda thing over USB? Can two PCs be connected to the same USB bus and talk to each other?
I don't know what experiences other people have had with this thing, but in very short order it was using 100 megs of memory on a Linux machine with only 96 megs of physical RAM and it didn't seem to be anywhere close to finished. I had to kill it before it killed the machine.
My already limited confidence in the competence of the NIPC has been struck another blow. Maybe they haven't released the source because they don't want anyone to confirm what an utter piece of shit this thing is, or do a much better job than they can do for free instead of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Microwave ovens operate at 2.45 GHz. It's not the "resonant frequency" of water. It's the frequency the FCC allocated to microwave ovens. Any RF energy will cause measurable heating in organic matter at sufficient power levels, and higher frequency RF is inherently more powerful.
Most old analog cell phones operate at 800 MHz. Handheld analog cell phones are dangerous because they operate at one watt. That may not sound like much, but absorbed power is proportional to the inverse cube of distance... so your brain is absorbing a decent percentage of that one watt a centimeter or two away.
Most "digital" cell phones (European GSM (Sprint Spectrum or any system that uses those big ol' Ericsson phones with the YES and NO buttons) and PCS) use various bands between 1 and 2 GHz and put out between 100-500 mW (0.1-0.5 watts).
There's an amateur radio band at 1.2 GHz, meant for handheld radios. Traditional ham knowledge (and FCC regulations) say that you should use 100 mW at the very most when operating a handheld transciever because it's right next to your head. The danger isn't so much in the heating effects... if you don't feel your head getting warm, there aren't any worthwhile heating effects. The danger is in the way microwave frequencies are absorbed so well by tissue. On the relatively low "shortwave" frequencies that span the globe (about 3-15 MHz), wavelengths are incredibly long... from about 80 meters to about 20 meters. Very little of that energy can be absorbed by a person less than two meters tall. It's like a cork on a gigantic wave that hasn't broken yet; it just rides the wave.
1.2 GHz has a wavelength of 25 cm. Half of that wavelength (think of the uuper hump of a sine wave) easily fits inside your head. I dunno about you, but I personally don't enjoy microwaving my brain for the convenience of not having to use a pay phone.
Anyone else notice at the end of the article, he claims:
(Note: This article, like many of the others before it, was composed using an Open Source software product)
Which open source product? Microsoft Word 97, using Save to HTML? The text of his article badly needs the Demoroniser... it's full of lots of question marks in place of apostrophies.
Just because he didn't pay for it doesn't mean it's free software or open source software.
A couple years ago when I did in-person tech support, the company I worked for paid for an alphanumeric pager with unlimited messaging. The company that provided the paging service had a web page that you could enter messages into, but charged extra for an email address to send messages to. I set up a sendmail alias to use a quick & dirty perl script I wrote to submit messages via the POST method to the page's target cgi script, and bam, nearly instantaneous email on a $20/mo pager (that I wasn't paying for:). Adding fetchmail to the mix let me get all of my email on it, if I wanted... but I found that got annoying. Of course I couldn't reply to messages on the pager, but composing messages on any handheld or smaller device is painfully pointless anyway, IMHO.
I've tried doing something similar with my fancy-schmancy PCS phone, but it cuts off messages at a uselessly short 100 characters, there are often long messaging delays, and the display is 12 columns by 4 rows.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be interested in getting this thing netbooted. Hooking up a HD looks like too much expense and trouble for a $100 device. I know I could get it working with PLIP, but based on my past experience with it (slow, interrupt hell), I'd prefer to use the USB port for connectivity.
Does anyone know of a way to do a PPP-kinda thing over USB? Can two PCs be connected to the same USB bus and talk to each other?
I don't know what experiences other people have had with this thing, but in very short order it was using 100 megs of memory on a Linux machine with only 96 megs of physical RAM and it didn't seem to be anywhere close to finished. I had to kill it before it killed the machine.
My already limited confidence in the competence of the NIPC has been struck another blow. Maybe they haven't released the source because they don't want anyone to confirm what an utter piece of shit this thing is, or do a much better job than they can do for free instead of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Most old analog cell phones operate at 800 MHz. Handheld analog cell phones are dangerous because they operate at one watt. That may not sound like much, but absorbed power is proportional to the inverse cube of distance... so your brain is absorbing a decent percentage of that one watt a centimeter or two away.
Most "digital" cell phones (European GSM (Sprint Spectrum or any system that uses those big ol' Ericsson phones with the YES and NO buttons) and PCS) use various bands between 1 and 2 GHz and put out between 100-500 mW (0.1-0.5 watts).
There's an amateur radio band at 1.2 GHz, meant for handheld radios. Traditional ham knowledge (and FCC regulations) say that you should use 100 mW at the very most when operating a handheld transciever because it's right next to your head. The danger isn't so much in the heating effects... if you don't feel your head getting warm, there aren't any worthwhile heating effects. The danger is in the way microwave frequencies are absorbed so well by tissue. On the relatively low "shortwave" frequencies that span the globe (about 3-15 MHz), wavelengths are incredibly long... from about 80 meters to about 20 meters. Very little of that energy can be absorbed by a person less than two meters tall. It's like a cork on a gigantic wave that hasn't broken yet; it just rides the wave.
1.2 GHz has a wavelength of 25 cm. Half of that wavelength (think of the uuper hump of a sine wave) easily fits inside your head. I dunno about you, but I personally don't enjoy microwaving my brain for the convenience of not having to use a pay phone.
(Note: This article, like many of the others before it, was composed using an Open Source software product)
Which open source product? Microsoft Word 97, using Save to HTML? The text of his article badly needs the Demoroniser... it's full of lots of question marks in place of apostrophies.
Just because he didn't pay for it doesn't mean it's free software or open source software.
A couple years ago when I did in-person tech support, the company I worked for paid for an alphanumeric pager with unlimited messaging. The company that provided the paging service had a web page that you could enter messages into, but charged extra for an email address to send messages to. I set up a sendmail alias to use a quick & dirty perl script I wrote to submit messages via the POST method to the page's target cgi script, and bam, nearly instantaneous email on a $20/mo pager (that I wasn't paying for :). Adding fetchmail to the mix let me get all of my email on it, if I wanted... but I found that got annoying. Of course I couldn't reply to messages on the pager, but composing messages on any handheld or smaller device is painfully pointless anyway, IMHO.
I've tried doing something similar with my fancy-schmancy PCS phone, but it cuts off messages at a uselessly short 100 characters, there are often long messaging delays, and the display is 12 columns by 4 rows.