Sure, Manchester is simple, but you still have to set up a PLL, sample and compare with a flip-flop and get your edge transitions...can be difficult to get tuned right. But then, that's where all the fun is.
I'm more interested in the glut of Motorola's onCore GPS boards that have been showing up for $15-$20. If some wonderful manufacturer ever decided to offer a radio modem board for $20, we could have some interesting combos.
Th GPS is only 8 channel, but more accurate versions will probably surface soon.
It still leaves me wondering what makes this so special. What's so difficult about a straight RS-232-style connection? Buffer in, buffer out. Send a packet with an ID number. If someone's talking, wait.
Have any of you priced serial radio modems recently?
We're talking far, far more expensive than even the more expensive wireless Ethernet cards. Check this out: Arrick's wireless links.. $650.
Perhaps there are some modules that, in a manufacturing situation, are pretty cheap. But you're going to have to spend a lot, unless you're interested in developing with TI's transceiver modules. Break out a very tiny soldering iron and a magnifying glass, those flatpacks can get pretty small (this I say right before actually soldering a similar sized chip).
Since you seem to be incapable of sawing a 2x4 into a 20" wide chunk, buying two standard angle brackets for a few cents each, and screwing it together like a real man....
I suggest lots of duct tape.
What's happening to survival skills anyway. Any person with half a clue should be able to work up some decent bracketry. I build what I need all the time. I'm almost done with a workbench I need; portable, legs store underneath and it rolls on casters, with a storage space inside, power supply, lighting, etc.,.
When you go buy your duct tape, glance into the hardware section and notice various things called "saws" and "hammers" and "drills". They are your friends. Use them.
No, they haven't figured out how, and I don't want them to. It would be like the old days of two-floppy computers, except you would be trying to boot a modern, huge, OS.
See, with the watch drive, the beauty of it is the band is the cable. One end of the band is permanently connected to the watch. The other end is a standard USB connector, with the exception of a spring-loaded catch you have to squeeze before you can unplug it from the watch. So, all you do is squeeze the connector on both sides, where it is held in the watch, the connector is already in your fingers now and ready to plug in a nearby USB port. The band will be sold in several sizes, with spring tension on one end to pick up any slack.
Not incredibly useful, but pretty neat local security, cuz how are you going to boot without a/boot partition or access to the BIOS to change the boot sequence.
1. Pop computer open and clear CMOS, if you need to. 2. Place bootable rootfloppy or CDROM in computer. 3. Wreak untold havoc on xchino's system.
Imagine carrying around your whole OS, and necessary data on an encrypted pendrive!
More likely:
Imagine carrying around your whole OS and data you've been working on, and then pulling your keys out of your pocket and the drive falls into a storm drain!
I'm really not too excited about ultra-tiny storage formats. A CD is about the right size to keep track of, a floppy in a hardcase is still OK. But...CompactFlash cards? Memory Stick? USB pendrives? Enough people lose their keys, socks, and wedding rings.
A USB watch drive would be a nice solution. It's always there. Just make the watch reasonably easy to take on and off, and you've got a winner. Adding USB storage to cell phones would be nice as well.
Because your desk-mounted antenna also has to transmit. There have already been experiments in "war-flying", an attacker would only have to go to a taller building, fly overhead and hope to capture some useful data, or find a way to toss a capture device on the roof of the building.
If this is a multi-level office building, residents above the floor could receive client station transmissions, and residents below could receive base station transmissions.
Infrared removes all advantages of wireless networking. If wireless is being used in a business, then they want to have a network connection anywhere in the building (so the laptop works in the conference room, one less cable for the techs to worry about, etc.).
There really is no way to practically secure a wireless network, if the attacker has access to the data. Access is always the front line of security...you're not going to let someone come in and sit in a spare cubicle sniffing packets.
Wireless may be necessary in some cases, but a determination should be made of the security risk. If no sensitive data goes across the wireless network, then it doesn't matter if someone sniffs packets.
Sensitive data:
Valid passwords and usernames
Company credit card numbers and other financial information
Trade secrets (coporate espionage is HUGE)
Any inside information that could be used to social engineer an employee or blackmail executives
There is no hardware or software method to prevent the above from going across a wireless network, sooner or later. Even casual web browsing can provide black hats with enough information to cause damage. About the only semi-safe methods are (supposedly) encrypted web browsing, and transferring file archives with strong encryption.
What I'd like to see is a method for trapping all radio waves within a building. Let's see: at 5GHz, the wavelength is 29979200/5000000000 meters, or 6 cm. So, you need a Faraday cage with a grid diagonal of 6cm or less. I'd be interested to find out if such a grid could be applied with conductive paint, and transparent conductive grid films applied to windows. It would be a huge project to do an entire building, but you've also eliminated Van Eck monitor reading and wireless keyboard listening.
Until someone develops a spherical directable-array antenna that makes tight-beam transmissions practical, wireless is too big of a risk for any serious organization.
Include a custom peripheral, like Steel Battalion does.
This peripheral would convert any office chair into an ejection seat, for those times when you absolutely positively cannot get out of admitting you were surfing the web, instead of working.
On submarines and ships, they used to have only red lights inside when it was dark (or the person who had to go outside would wear red goggles inside). This was to preserve the ability to see detail in the dark. The eye's light sensors are able to recover quickly from red light, less so from other wavelengths.
Remember this at your next dimly-lit LAN party, where you've modded your computer and mouse with blue LEDs. And don't blame me when you trip and fall on the way to the fridge for another Mountain Dew. Or get fragged by someone you never saw, because your dark sensitivity was diminished after staring lovingly at your glowing blue mouse during respawn.
Go to eInk and check out a few of their products. They'll prototype up some stuff for you at a pretty reasonable cost, in the $20k range.
It's thin, it's light, it's power-saving, it's going to be pretty cheap once large-scale manufacturing kicks in. You could seal this stuff under a clear keycap. The major engineering problem, that I can see, is getting all the graphics data to the keys. Based on how the tech works, you'd probably be making a segmented character display, rather than dot-matrix. If you want a dot-matrix graphics display, they have to put an active-matrix array behind the eInk layer to control the dots.
The stuff is also easy to see in bright light...something difficult to achieve with LEDs. Plus, it stays in the state you left it...no blank keyboard when your KeyCapWriter drivers crash on powerup.
If you really insist on them glowing, put a single LED in the key and front-light the eInk with a plastic light guide.
You'll align your product with another emerging technology, probably strengthing both companies' chances (or pinning your chances on their success, whatever way you look at it).
I don't work for eInk; wish I did. They once had an opening for a hardware engineer.
The Mozilla community notifies us *when a security flaw is found*.
Do you want to know about a problem when it is discovered, or after someone has already engineered a fix?
If your car was discovered to be prone to stopping dead on the highway and blowing up, you'd want to know before the manufacturer figured out how to make it stop doing that. You'd want to have the option of choosing to risk it, or parking the car and driving something else for a little while.
Now you know what activies are prone to security dangers, and can either avoid those activities or use another browser for a while.
Micromachining/nanotech may be useful for making a 3D display, but it's not going to behave the same way light from a hologram does.
Ok. I can see maybe one way it would be possible, but still doubt it would happen in my lifetime (I'm 22). Current holograms modify the properties of a film, physically, so that the wavefront is shaped a certain way when light passes through it. If it was possible to have nanomachines that could form a transparent film, and modify the light passing through them dynamically, then you would have a programmable hologram. Another issue would be getting the massive required data amounts to the nanoholopixels (look, a new word!).
Perhaps a true 3D light display, though non-holographic, could be constructed of transparent nano-scale voxels each carrying three tiny LEDs. Kind of like a big stack of transparent OLED displays. Probably would create a corporate-sized power bill as a side effect.
Maybe someone will do these on a small scale before I'm dead, but it will be something like a 32x32 array.
At my alma mater, there is a display of holograms in one of the halls.
Several typical displays; someone's head, a dollar bill, a computer motherboard.
And there is one fantastic piece. A hologram of a powerful microscope, that appears to stand right out in full scale.
Walk up to the microscope and place your eye where the virtual eyepiece is located. You will be treated to looking down the barrel of this nonexistant microscope, viewing the silicon die of an integrated circuit.
Until the light wavefronts can be accurately manipulated, no 3D display will ever be able to approach this level of realism. I don't see it happening within my lifetime.
...remained silent when she realized (and for that long, she had to have realized) that something wasn't right.
I don't see where she had to realize something was wrong. If anything, the longer it went on, the less likely she would pay attention to it.
This is something you seem to have trouble getting: many people don't think about something if it's not there. People set up credit card auto-deducts so they never have to worry about paying a dozen different bills. I can easily see where someone wouldn't realize the ISP wasn't deducting the money.
You may say there's no information saying that it was an auto-deduct account, but I say there's equally no information saying she knew about it before they came up with a $214 charge.
She tried to help pay for their mistake and the ISP agreed to accept half the back charges. And then they reneged on their agreement, held her emails hostage, and demanded the full amount.
I don't see anything good in any of the ISP's conduct.
Maybe you're so smart that you will never miss a detail. But in case you do, your mom will doubtlessly help you out with a gentle reminder over dinner.
If a company makes a mistake, it's their fault. More specifically, the person within the company who initially made the mistake.
Imagine for moment, you sign up for ISP service. They have a handy auto-deduct setup, so you don't have to worry about the monthly or tri-monthly fees.
Also imagine, though unlikely, that you have a life and are very busy. Are you going to pore over your credit card statement, hunting to make sure the ISP charged you? If they bill every three months, it would get pretty easy to lose track of.
The company made a mistake, either by hiring careless workers or faulty software. They have to eat the loss.
As I said before, who checks their credit card statement for things that aren't there? Many ISP's auto-charge your card, and I believe that was the situation here.
Not sure what you're getting at...they made an accounting mistake. If they didn't bill her when they were supposed to, what gives them the right to go back and demand 200 smackers out of the blue?
She wanted to keep her service going, but at the same time didn't want to clean up the mess that was their own fault. I wouldn't have even offered to pay the 200 bucks, and would have canceled the service since they obviously couldn't handle the business.
Many ISP's have a credit-card auto-deduct service. I imagine she didn't pore over her credit card bill every month to look for something that wasn't there.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, Manchester is simple, but you still have to set up a PLL, sample and compare with a flip-flop and get your edge transitions...can be difficult to get tuned right. But then, that's where all the fun is.
The perfect size to integrate into a car dash computer.
I'm more interested in the glut of Motorola's onCore GPS boards that have been showing up for $15-$20. If some wonderful manufacturer ever decided to offer a radio modem board for $20, we could have some interesting combos.
Th GPS is only 8 channel, but more accurate versions will probably surface soon.
...embedded web server (which begs the question: why an embedded web server?).
Why? So it can get Slashdotted, of course!
It still leaves me wondering what makes this so special. What's so difficult about a straight RS-232-style connection? Buffer in, buffer out. Send a packet with an ID number. If someone's talking, wait.
Have any of you priced serial radio modems recently?
We're talking far, far more expensive than even the more expensive wireless Ethernet cards. Check this out: Arrick's wireless links.. $650.
Perhaps there are some modules that, in a manufacturing situation, are pretty cheap. But you're going to have to spend a lot, unless you're interested in developing with TI's transceiver modules. Break out a very tiny soldering iron and a magnifying glass, those flatpacks can get pretty small (this I say right before actually soldering a similar sized chip).
Since you seem to be incapable of sawing a 2x4 into a 20" wide chunk, buying two standard angle brackets for a few cents each, and screwing it together like a real man....
I suggest lots of duct tape.
What's happening to survival skills anyway. Any person with half a clue should be able to work up some decent bracketry. I build what I need all the time. I'm almost done with a workbench I need; portable, legs store underneath and it rolls on casters, with a storage space inside, power supply, lighting, etc.,.
When you go buy your duct tape, glance into the hardware section and notice various things called "saws" and "hammers" and "drills". They are your friends. Use them.
No, they haven't figured out how, and I don't want them to. It would be like the old days of two-floppy computers, except you would be trying to boot a modern, huge, OS.
See, with the watch drive, the beauty of it is the band is the cable. One end of the band is permanently connected to the watch. The other end is a standard USB connector, with the exception of a spring-loaded catch you have to squeeze before you can unplug it from the watch. So, all you do is squeeze the connector on both sides, where it is held in the watch, the connector is already in your fingers now and ready to plug in a nearby USB port. The band will be sold in several sizes, with spring tension on one end to pick up any slack.
Not incredibly useful, but pretty neat local security, cuz how are you going to boot without a /boot partition or access to the BIOS to change the boot sequence.
1. Pop computer open and clear CMOS, if you need to.
2. Place bootable rootfloppy or CDROM in computer.
3. Wreak untold havoc on xchino's system.
Ok, the next time you're frantically hunting for your 20GB "iNoseStud", I'll be laughing at you with a large red brick hanging off my PDA.
Imagine carrying around your whole OS, and necessary data on an encrypted pendrive!
More likely:
Imagine carrying around your whole OS and data you've been working on, and then pulling your keys out of your pocket and the drive falls into a storm drain!
I'm really not too excited about ultra-tiny storage formats. A CD is about the right size to keep track of, a floppy in a hardcase is still OK. But...CompactFlash cards? Memory Stick? USB pendrives? Enough people lose their keys, socks, and wedding rings.
A USB watch drive would be a nice solution. It's always there. Just make the watch reasonably easy to take on and off, and you've got a winner. Adding USB storage to cell phones would be nice as well.
Because your desk-mounted antenna also has to transmit. There have already been experiments in "war-flying", an attacker would only have to go to a taller building, fly overhead and hope to capture some useful data, or find a way to toss a capture device on the roof of the building.
If this is a multi-level office building, residents above the floor could receive client station transmissions, and residents below could receive base station transmissions.
There really is no way to practically secure a wireless network, if the attacker has access to the data. Access is always the front line of security...you're not going to let someone come in and sit in a spare cubicle sniffing packets.
Wireless may be necessary in some cases, but a determination should be made of the security risk. If no sensitive data goes across the wireless network, then it doesn't matter if someone sniffs packets.
Sensitive data:
There is no hardware or software method to prevent the above from going across a wireless network, sooner or later. Even casual web browsing can provide black hats with enough information to cause damage. About the only semi-safe methods are (supposedly) encrypted web browsing, and transferring file archives with strong encryption.
What I'd like to see is a method for trapping all radio waves within a building. Let's see: at 5GHz, the wavelength is 29979200/5000000000 meters, or 6 cm. So, you need a Faraday cage with a grid diagonal of 6cm or less. I'd be interested to find out if such a grid could be applied with conductive paint, and transparent conductive grid films applied to windows. It would be a huge project to do an entire building, but you've also eliminated Van Eck monitor reading and wireless keyboard listening.
Until someone develops a spherical directable-array antenna that makes tight-beam transmissions practical, wireless is too big of a risk for any serious organization.
Include a custom peripheral, like Steel Battalion does.
This peripheral would convert any office chair into an ejection seat, for those times when you absolutely positively cannot get out of admitting you were surfing the web, instead of working.
The obvious reason NOT to do this.
On submarines and ships, they used to have only red lights inside when it was dark (or the person who had to go outside would wear red goggles inside). This was to preserve the ability to see detail in the dark. The eye's light sensors are able to recover quickly from red light, less so from other wavelengths.
Remember this at your next dimly-lit LAN party, where you've modded your computer and mouse with blue LEDs. And don't blame me when you trip and fall on the way to the fridge for another Mountain Dew. Or get fragged by someone you never saw, because your dark sensitivity was diminished after staring lovingly at your glowing blue mouse during respawn.
Here's a tip.
Go to eInk and check out a few of their products. They'll prototype up some stuff for you at a pretty reasonable cost, in the $20k range.
It's thin, it's light, it's power-saving, it's going to be pretty cheap once large-scale manufacturing kicks in. You could seal this stuff under a clear keycap. The major engineering problem, that I can see, is getting all the graphics data to the keys. Based on how the tech works, you'd probably be making a segmented character display, rather than dot-matrix. If you want a dot-matrix graphics display, they have to put an active-matrix array behind the eInk layer to control the dots.
The stuff is also easy to see in bright light...something difficult to achieve with LEDs. Plus, it stays in the state you left it...no blank keyboard when your KeyCapWriter drivers crash on powerup.
If you really insist on them glowing, put a single LED in the key and front-light the eInk with a plastic light guide.
You'll align your product with another emerging technology, probably strengthing both companies' chances (or pinning your chances on their success, whatever way you look at it).
I don't work for eInk; wish I did. They once had an opening for a hardware engineer.
Look.
Microsoft notifes us *when a patch is available*.
The Mozilla community notifies us *when a security flaw is found*.
Do you want to know about a problem when it is discovered, or after someone has already engineered a fix?
If your car was discovered to be prone to stopping dead on the highway and blowing up, you'd want to know before the manufacturer figured out how to make it stop doing that. You'd want to have the option of choosing to risk it, or parking the car and driving something else for a little while.
Now you know what activies are prone to security dangers, and can either avoid those activities or use another browser for a while.
Micromachining/nanotech may be useful for making a 3D display, but it's not going to behave the same way light from a hologram does.
Ok. I can see maybe one way it would be possible, but still doubt it would happen in my lifetime (I'm 22). Current holograms modify the properties of a film, physically, so that the wavefront is shaped a certain way when light passes through it. If it was possible to have nanomachines that could form a transparent film, and modify the light passing through them dynamically, then you would have a programmable hologram. Another issue would be getting the massive required data amounts to the nanoholopixels (look, a new word!).
Perhaps a true 3D light display, though non-holographic, could be constructed of transparent nano-scale voxels each carrying three tiny LEDs. Kind of like a big stack of transparent OLED displays. Probably would create a corporate-sized power bill as a side effect.
Maybe someone will do these on a small scale before I'm dead, but it will be something like a 32x32 array.
I hope I'm proven wrong.
At my alma mater, there is a display of holograms in one of the halls.
Several typical displays; someone's head, a dollar bill, a computer motherboard.
And there is one fantastic piece. A hologram of a powerful microscope, that appears to stand right out in full scale.
Walk up to the microscope and place your eye where the virtual eyepiece is located. You will be treated to looking down the barrel of this nonexistant microscope, viewing the silicon die of an integrated circuit.
Until the light wavefronts can be accurately manipulated, no 3D display will ever be able to approach this level of realism. I don't see it happening within my lifetime.
Yes.
It *is* quite fun to know the WAN-wide VNC password.
*evil grin*
No, I wasn't responsible for that little detail.
See, people forget little details, like closing their italics tags
...remained silent when she realized (and for that long, she had to have realized) that something wasn't right.
I don't see where she had to realize something was wrong. If anything, the longer it went on, the less likely she would pay attention to it.
This is something you seem to have trouble getting: many people don't think about something if it's not there. People set up credit card auto-deducts so they never have to worry about paying a dozen different bills. I can easily see where someone wouldn't realize the ISP wasn't deducting the money.
You may say there's no information saying that it was an auto-deduct account, but I say there's equally no information saying she knew about it before they came up with a $214 charge.
She tried to help pay for their mistake and the ISP agreed to accept half the back charges. And then they reneged on their agreement, held her emails hostage, and demanded the full amount.
I don't see anything good in any of the ISP's conduct.
Maybe you're so smart that you will never miss a detail. But in case you do, your mom will doubtlessly help you out with a gentle reminder over dinner.
You're an idiot.
If a company makes a mistake, it's their fault. More specifically, the person within the company who initially made the mistake.
Imagine for moment, you sign up for ISP service. They have a handy auto-deduct setup, so you don't have to worry about the monthly or tri-monthly fees.
Also imagine, though unlikely, that you have a life and are very busy. Are you going to pore over your credit card statement, hunting to make sure the ISP charged you? If they bill every three months, it would get pretty easy to lose track of.
The company made a mistake, either by hiring careless workers or faulty software. They have to eat the loss.
As I said before, who checks their credit card statement for things that aren't there? Many ISP's auto-charge your card, and I believe that was the situation here.
Not sure what you're getting at...they made an accounting mistake. If they didn't bill her when they were supposed to, what gives them the right to go back and demand 200 smackers out of the blue?
She wanted to keep her service going, but at the same time didn't want to clean up the mess that was their own fault. I wouldn't have even offered to pay the 200 bucks, and would have canceled the service since they obviously couldn't handle the business.
Many ISP's have a credit-card auto-deduct service. I imagine she didn't pore over her credit card bill every month to look for something that wasn't there.