No offense, but just when did manufacturers start making SSB handhelds?
In 2000. I guess you haven't seen this! 1.8 MHz through 450 MHz, all modes, self-contained AA batteries, and OK it's got a shoulder strap, but it's a handheld.
And no, I haven't missed articles on working satellites via FM. That's what I was talking about.
People can set their own challenge levels, and if they are interested they work from low to high. Having an easy satellite mode would have been a great starter for beginners and especially young people. You know young people, they look like other hams, but aren't bald with a limp:-)
People gave me the same argument about packet in the 80's, which came down to where's the sport in that? Not everybody is into Amateur Radio for the sport.
One problem is the attitude of the satellite. It's probably got the high-gain antennas pointing in the opposite direction from the earth right now, because of the attitude they got it in for the burn. So, when it resets, it's supposed to use optical sun and earth sensors to orient itself. There are torque wheels and/or gyroscopes to do the physical orientation, it doesn't burn fuel for this. But the earth sensor was being blinded by the sun, so that might not work correctly, at least not in this part of the year.
How well can the radiation conditions of space be replicated on earth for testing tis sort of thing?
You use an X-ray machine, a van de Graf generator, a vaccumm chamber, and so on. It doesn't get you all of the way there, but it can give you some data.
Sigh. I don't know about you, but this really un-made my day. AMSAT has to be about the bravest amateur experimenter group out there. They envisioned a new day for ham radio powered by a super satellite that would give you worldwide range with a walkie-talkie and a handheld beam. We have that now to some extent, but not as reliably and not for as many people as they were planning. Well, they aren't quitters, and if this bird turns out to be a loss (not necessarily the case yet) we'll see the same capability in a series of smaller, cheaper, easier-to-launch birds.
We did have some good news for hams this week - the space station ham rig is running great, and Germany just lowered the Morse Code requirement to an easy 5 words-per-minute like the U.S. Now, we just have to get rid of that code requirement entirely.
You can't receive it if it's not sending. One of the ground controllers has deep experience in writing software modems and did in fact design the RF link-layer used for much of digital Amateur radio. For the hams in the audience, this is G3RUH. Actually, if this particular beacon was sending properly I could get it, and decode it, at home with no problem.
NASA has launched lots of duds. You learn this by doing that. This is the 40th Amateur satellite to reach orbit, and while it's the most ambitious, these folks know what they are doing.
I have a nice high-speed connection and still find interest. I've a ground station with azimuth-elevation rotator on dual crossed beams for 145 and 440 MHz. And of course I do regular VHF and HF as well. It's fun to be able to communicate without the internet or a phone network, and the technical skills one can acquire this way are substantial. Hamming is what got me started in a technical career.
They were really pushing the technology. The thing has an ammonia arc-jet motor for orbit maintainance. Such a thing has never been tried. That's the smaller motor, the kick-motor is more conventional. And of course there are tons of experiments like orbit-to-ground laser communications, TV cameras, and a full compliment of Amateur radio repeaters. You're supposed to be able to talk through this with a walkie-talkie.
But yes, this is a large number of initial failures for a ham satellite. Most of them are much simpler. But all of them have things break and they patch around it and go on using the bird. The same is true for commercial communications satellites.
The rad-hard CPU of choice for spaceborne equipment is the 1802. Remember the RCA COSMAC personal computer of long ago? I think they have this in silicon-on-sapphire. There are a small number of satellite hackers who still practice 1802 assembler at this late date. It should suffice to say that nobody uses this CPU for anything else any longer. So, an experiment with a modern CPU was very desirable. It looks like the problem might not be in the CPU.
I think I've been running Debian "unstable" since about 1994:-) . It's true that it doesn't break often. The biggest problem I'm having at the moment is that the 2.4 kernel doesn't work for my wavelan PCMCIA card, and I doubt that's really Debian's problem. There was some confusion around the XFree 4 transition - Xwrapper.conf was set to allow "rootonly" to start the X server, and that broke everything. Other than that, pretty much nothing breaks.
I sympathize. I am on the advisory boards of all major Linux certification projects. If the test had much perl content, I'd probably fail. I just don't like perl, and thus haven't done much with it.
There is more than just source-code line information generated by -g. Information about variable types, sizes, and displacements is generated as well. This makes source-code-debugging work. There is an "abbreviated" form of -g that is useful if you don't want to make the executable too fat.
I bet 95% of slashdot posters didn't even know that there's a per-process core-dump-size limit that they might want to clear from main() for a debugging executable. Also, I did a text search and nobody was even covering -g. The rest of the post was, I admit, mundane.
Provide early binaries, as soon as you are ready for non-programmers to help you find bugs. Compile them with -g and make sure they clear the
core-dump-size limit when they start execution, so
that you can get a valid core dump.
People who want source will click for source. Certainly I've debugged many a Debian program starting only with a binary, and then downloading the Debian source package.
No matter what they do with
their copy of the code, my copy is still here untouched.
Well, people have been able to make money with my code under the GPL rules. But I never would have contributed that code without the GPL. And I care little about the copy on my hard drive. The point is the copies in other people's hands, and that's where the GPL protections are important. We would never have gotten free software into so many people's hands with different rules.
Lots of folks around here have this very simplistic view of freedom. They think men are islands. What you're saying is that you are not free unless you have the right to make me a slave. The GPL is a way of avoiding a particular sort of "slavery", as are the laws of most nations. The problem is that people live in communities, they are not islands, and to preserve freedom in the large you do indeed have to restrict it in the small.
When we get into BSD vs. GPL discussions, it's important to note that not all of the people in the discussion are the developers who actually choose the licenses. Go look at the freshmeat submissions on any day, and you'll realize where developer sentiment lies. Users and other folks can have whatever licensing they want, as long as they don't make me write their code.
Linux is probably the first real kernel
written by volunteers - BSD was written by people
working on a government grant, and is derivative
of ATT Unix, although later modifications are contributed by volunteers. Why do those volunteers feel good about writing free code? Because abuses are prohibited by the license. Otherwise, they'd be dupes, unpaid employees working for someone else who makes all of the money on a product and puts economic locks on that product using proprietary software, cutting out the free contributor. In that case, the free code would actually be weakening the free software movement by playing into the abuser's hands. That's why more developers choose the GPL. And it's the developers who matter here - no code? Then there's little prospect for users.
The choice is simple here, at least for me. I write BSD-licensed code when someone else is paying me to do so and they insist on the BSD license. I write LGPL or GPL-licensed code the rest of the time, and I feel good about that it's doing for the free software movement.
But the GPL, in the license text not the rationale, makes an assurance that later licenses will be similar in spirit.
What if there is a legal problem with the GPL and we can't fix it because Linus has restricted the kernel to "version 2 only"? We'll be up the creek. And remember that there have been few court tests of Free Software licenses, so we need to be able to clean up a problem if one comes up. By the time this happens, some of the Linux copyright holders will be dead (if some aren't today) and we'll have to write out and replace some good free code in order to solve the problem.
Oh come on. Inclusion of a library in a program is not analogous to a quotation in a literary work. Quotations are required to be brief and attributed inline, while libraries are often a large part of the work and contribute substantial functionality.
This sounds very confused. Show me where in the GPL it says anything about that "direction". The point about a BSD wrapper for a GPL library is bogus as well, because the GPL license still applies no matter how you wrap it.
Slashdot Mirror
In 2000. I guess you haven't seen this! 1.8 MHz through 450 MHz, all modes, self-contained AA batteries, and OK it's got a shoulder strap, but it's a handheld.
And no, I haven't missed articles on working satellites via FM. That's what I was talking about.
People can set their own challenge levels, and if they are interested they work from low to high. Having an easy satellite mode would have been a great starter for beginners and especially young people. You know young people, they look like other hams, but aren't bald with a limp :-)
People gave me the same argument about packet in the 80's, which came down to where's the sport in that? Not everybody is into Amateur Radio for the sport.
Thanks
Bruce
So, we all cross our fingers.
Thanks
Bruce
How well can the radiation conditions of space be replicated on earth for testing tis sort of thing?
You use an X-ray machine, a van de Graf generator, a vaccumm chamber, and so on. It doesn't get you all of the way there, but it can give you some data.
Thanks
Bruce
We did have some good news for hams this week - the space station ham rig is running great, and Germany just lowered the Morse Code requirement to an easy 5 words-per-minute like the U.S. Now, we just have to get rid of that code requirement entirely.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
But yes, this is a large number of initial failures for a ham satellite. Most of them are much simpler. But all of them have things break and they patch around it and go on using the bird. The same is true for commercial communications satellites.
Thanks
Bruce
The rad-hard CPU of choice for spaceborne equipment is the 1802. Remember the RCA COSMAC personal computer of long ago? I think they have this in silicon-on-sapphire. There are a small number of satellite hackers who still practice 1802 assembler at this late date. It should suffice to say that nobody uses this CPU for anything else any longer. So, an experiment with a modern CPU was very desirable. It looks like the problem might not be in the CPU.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks!
Bruce
I am writing one. Given how busy I am, nothing might come of that. But if I had to make a second choice, it would be Ruby.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I try to write readable code and use rather long identifiers in general. I find that my comments explain why I did something rather than what I did.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
I bet 95% of slashdot posters didn't even know that there's a per-process core-dump-size limit that they might want to clear from main() for a debugging executable. Also, I did a text search and nobody was even covering -g. The rest of the post was, I admit, mundane.
Thanks
Bruce
People who want source will click for source. Certainly I've debugged many a Debian program starting only with a binary, and then downloading the Debian source package.
Thanks
Bruce
Well, people have been able to make money with my code under the GPL rules. But I never would have contributed that code without the GPL. And I care little about the copy on my hard drive. The point is the copies in other people's hands, and that's where the GPL protections are important. We would never have gotten free software into so many people's hands with different rules.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Linux is probably the first real kernel written by volunteers - BSD was written by people working on a government grant, and is derivative of ATT Unix, although later modifications are contributed by volunteers. Why do those volunteers feel good about writing free code? Because abuses are prohibited by the license. Otherwise, they'd be dupes, unpaid employees working for someone else who makes all of the money on a product and puts economic locks on that product using proprietary software, cutting out the free contributor. In that case, the free code would actually be weakening the free software movement by playing into the abuser's hands. That's why more developers choose the GPL. And it's the developers who matter here - no code? Then there's little prospect for users.
The choice is simple here, at least for me. I write BSD-licensed code when someone else is paying me to do so and they insist on the BSD license. I write LGPL or GPL-licensed code the rest of the time, and I feel good about that it's doing for the free software movement.
Thanks
Bruce
What if there is a legal problem with the GPL and we can't fix it because Linus has restricted the kernel to "version 2 only"? We'll be up the creek. And remember that there have been few court tests of Free Software licenses, so we need to be able to clean up a problem if one comes up. By the time this happens, some of the Linux copyright holders will be dead (if some aren't today) and we'll have to write out and replace some good free code in order to solve the problem.
Thanks
Bruce
But that is moot because the old license with its looser provisions is still available to you.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce