Some of this gives me the creeps knowing that I was living in Ottawa at the time. This underscores why the US embassy there resembles a fortress. Unfortunately, if they had decided to strike there, it would probably be the only thing left standing in a 2 block radius. Maybe the Israelis would be interesting in moving into the Diefenbunker. (The WW3 nuclear bomb shelter built just out of town by a former PM, since abanoned by the canadian gov't and turned into a museum)
- - - - - - -
To: Real name unknown
From: Unknown
Folder: Hamza
Date: August 23, 2001
Special file for our brother Abu Bakr al-Albani ["the Albanian"] on the nature of his mission.
First, the mission: Gather information on:
1. Information on American soldiers who frequent nightclubs in the America-Canada border areas
2. The Israeli embassy, consulate, and cultural center in Canada
3. If it is possible to enter America and gather information on American soldier checkpoints, or on the American army in the border areas inside America
4. Information on the possibility of obtaining explosive devices inside Canada...
I have given to our brother $1,500 for travel expenses in Canada and America, and also the cost of the ticket for the trip back to us after four months, God willing.
The truth is somewhere in the middle
on
Spectrum as Property
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The amount of information that can be transmitted over an RF link with a given frequency band and noise floor is finite. The Shannon limit describes the absolute bottom signal to noise limit, below which no useful information can be sent. With wideband spead spectrum technology and robust error detection/correction algorithms, we can finally approach it. That is the bad news. The good news, this is 100x better than most of the (mostly uncompressed analog) open air transmission methods currently being used.
Consider a regular, low noise telephone line limited to 3 KHz bandwidth, no DSL, ISDN, or other high bandwidth enhancements. The first generation telephone modems ran at 110 or 300 baud. Eventually, QAM modulated modems came out that worked at 1200 baud. Later, 2400 baud modem appeared. This proved to be the limit of pure analog op-amp filter technology. 9600 baud modems requred a DSP, to process and recover data from the incoming signal. Later, 19.2k, 28.8k, 33k, and eventually (almost) 56k modems appeared, as the DSPs got faster, and more sophisticated filtering, error detection and recovery algorithms were used. But this was the limit. Pushing more data through a bandwidth limited, voice quality phone line requires a lower noise floor, or more bandwidth. Sending symbols faster requires greater bandwidth. Using a more complex symbol constellation requires a lower noise floor, or eventually the bits smear into each other to an extent that the error recovery mechanism cannot cope.
Open RF is much the same - you have a finite slice of bandwidth to use. You can reduce the signal to noise ratio by increasing the transmitter power, but then you become a greater noise source for everybody else who is transmitting over the same spectrum. CDMA phones are constantly adjusting their transmit power up and down, depending on how well the base station is receiving them. If the BER (Bit Error Rate) is too high, the phone is told to raise its transmit power. If the BER is low, the phone is told to reduce power, in order to reduce the noise. In a CDMA system, you can always add "just one more" transmitter, but eventually the noise floor is raised to the point where calls are dropped.
Also in open RF there are other problems to contend with, that dictate the optimal method of transmission - fading, (transmitter moves behind or out from behind a building) multipath, (Signal takes multiple paths to receiver, resulting in overlap because signals arrive at different times - think of trying to talk across an echoing canyon) and dopplar shifts. (Transmitter is moving, resulting in shifted carrier frequency) In practice, open RF is a pretty crappy transmission medium as compared to any sort of physical link.
In order to preserve optimal use of the spectrum for others, you don't want to transmit omnidirectional. If the receiver is in front of you, the signal you transmit to the sides and back are just wasted transmitter power, and an unwanted noise source for everybody else. Ideally, you only want the signal to go in a laser like path between transmitter and receiver. Very tricky if you don't know where the receiver is, or if it is moving.
One nut rammed his truck into the front steps at parliament hill a few years back.
A crazed soldier walked into the Quebec legislature 20 years back, and shot the place up - it was just chance that he screwed up the time the legislature was in session, and arrived when the chamber was empty.
I guess you could also count the time back in 1916 when the mob burned the centre block to a gutted shell. Despite that, I am glad they don't turn the place into a fortress.
Actually, I wonder how long it will be before somebody cooks up and circulates a patch to uncripple the systems? Should be simple to trace and fix, as it is an artifical, hard coded limit.
And technically it wouldn't be piracy, since you are still running a legit copy of windows, unless they try to enforce leaving the PC in a crippled state as part of the licencing terms. (I wonder how this would fly in the courts)
> And since you are so against fixed speed limits, what exactly is your solution?
My solution is what is reasonable and prudent under the circumstances. The autobahn is one of the safest highways in the world, with no fixed speed limits.
The more patent heavy corporations that have vested interest in FOSS, the better. This way, if a FOSS unfriendly company decides to launch a patent attack that would be damaging to the bottom line of FOSS friendly companies (IBM, HP, Novell) then it is all the more likely that the attacker will be found in violation of somebody else's patents. We have a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario, and the attacker will be forced to back down. Aside from a FOSS patent fund, the best defence is to have as many patent heavy corporate friends with a vested interest in the success of FOSS as possible.
And that time it recorded me doing 75 MPH, I was vacationing in Montana.
Fixed speed limits are a crock anyway, how does it tell the difference between driving on an icy covered road in a blizzard, and a clear day with dry roads and unlimited visibility, with no traffic? Driving 50 in the first case may be suicide, yet it is legal. Doing 50 on the open highway in clear conditions, you are a traffic impediment.
I expect it will be priced within reach in less than 5 years. When this happens, the spooks will be screwed. Anybody, and everybody will have secure, untappable communications.
Actually, it would be fun to see how many pentium-4's you could fit inside a PDP-11 case.
I miss those 8 inch 100K? floppy drives though - those were the days when floppy lived up to its nam, and the drives made interesting squeaking noises while they were being read. I still have a couple of them downstairs, I was part of the last class that used PDPs before the university retired the old 11/70.
The PDP OS had a weird (and annoying habit) of automatically making numbered backups every time you saved - in theory sounds like a good idea, except with an entire class editing and saving assignments, the main drive ran out of space and the whole system froze every 15 minutes, and we had to hunt down the TA to reboot it. "Delete your files, delete your files" was a cry heard every 5-10 minutes in the lab, lest the whole system hang and die yet again.
Back in the 1970's, that astronomically expensive PDP 11/03 in the Heathkit catalog was my dream machine, as it was the only true 16 bit PC on the market. I even bought the paper tape software and manuals for it!
I know this is OT, but there is nowhere else to post this - I thought I was the only one seeing them. Is it the viruses running rampant, or did something break after their last time they tweaked slashcode?
isnt' the lack of a pulse, (assuming the device works as intended)
It is carrying around the power supply for this thing, with wires sticking out of your body. Worldheart http://www.worldheart.com/ has been testing an artificial heart that can be powered without a physical connection, but you still have to carry the charger around.
Kind of ranks up there with Bill's quote that "640k ought to be be enough for anybody."
Towards the end of the 19th centry, it was widely believed that they had discovered everything there was to be known about physics.
When the Alvin submarine was sent down to explore the mid ocean ridge, it was widely thought it would be a waste of money, just a silly publicity stunt that couldn't do any real science, and that there was probably nothing worth seeing. But when they got there, they discovered an exotic ecosystem with many hithero unknown and undreamed of species of life thriving at unimaginable temperatures and pressure.
The same sentiments initially existed regarding radio and X-ray astronomy. Why bother, as there is nothing of importance to see?
Robots can do some of the advance work, but there is still no substitute for having a man on the ground. We won't know until we plant feet on new worlds what wonders lie waiting to be discovered.
I must say he has balls - right now the entire internet is being deluged by packet storms from compromised windows machines, (even bringing down google for some folks) and he worries that foreign hackers just *might* compromise the Linux source tree?
Since when did you ever need the kernel source code to root somebody? It has been done to Windows, Solaris, HP/UX and countless other closed source platforms for years.
I have been sort of thinking about this, and how patents are used in industry. Perhaps the intent can be reversed, as are done with software licences under copyleft.
Can we devise something analogous to GPL for a software or hardware patent, so that if you use it in your product or design, then you must provide full source code and/or schematics and/or ensure that all other patents used in the product or software are available under the same terms. Then all open source advocates have to do, is create their own patent portfolio, as long as we can find lawyers willing to help with the filing. We can fight fire with fire, the next time somebody tries to embrace and extend, they will have serious trouble if the interface is protected by a public patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Just buy a stack five cheapo DVD players, each coded to a different region. Maybe they could package them all into a single cabinet.
Some of this gives me the creeps knowing that I was living in Ottawa at the time. This underscores why the US embassy there resembles a fortress. Unfortunately, if they had decided to strike there, it would probably be the only thing left standing in a 2 block radius. Maybe the Israelis would be interesting in moving into the Diefenbunker. (The WW3 nuclear bomb shelter built just out of town by a former PM, since abanoned by the canadian gov't and turned into a museum)
...
- - - - - - -
To: Real name unknown
From: Unknown
Folder: Hamza
Date: August 23, 2001
Special file for our brother Abu Bakr al-Albani ["the Albanian"] on the nature of his mission.
First, the mission: Gather information on:
1. Information on American soldiers who frequent nightclubs in the America-Canada border areas
2. The Israeli embassy, consulate, and cultural center in Canada
3. If it is possible to enter America and gather information on American soldier checkpoints, or on the American army in the border areas inside America
4. Information on the possibility of obtaining explosive devices inside Canada
I have given to our brother $1,500 for travel expenses in Canada and America, and also the cost of the ticket for the trip back to us after four months, God willing.
The amount of information that can be transmitted over an RF link with a given frequency band and noise floor is finite. The Shannon limit describes the absolute bottom signal to noise limit, below which no useful information can be sent. With wideband spead spectrum technology and robust error detection/correction algorithms, we can finally approach it. That is the bad news. The good news, this is 100x better than most of the (mostly uncompressed analog) open air transmission methods currently being used.
Consider a regular, low noise telephone line limited to 3 KHz bandwidth, no DSL, ISDN, or other high bandwidth enhancements. The first generation telephone modems ran at 110 or 300 baud. Eventually, QAM modulated modems came out that worked at 1200 baud. Later, 2400 baud modem appeared. This proved to be the limit of pure analog op-amp filter technology. 9600 baud modems requred a DSP, to process and recover data from the incoming signal. Later, 19.2k, 28.8k, 33k, and eventually (almost) 56k modems appeared, as the DSPs got faster, and more sophisticated filtering, error detection and recovery algorithms were used. But this was the limit. Pushing more data through a bandwidth limited, voice quality phone line requires a lower noise floor, or more bandwidth. Sending symbols faster requires greater bandwidth. Using a more complex symbol constellation requires a lower noise floor, or eventually the bits smear into each other to an extent that the error recovery mechanism cannot cope.
Open RF is much the same - you have a finite slice of bandwidth to use. You can reduce the signal to noise ratio by increasing the transmitter power, but then you become a greater noise source for everybody else who is transmitting over the same spectrum. CDMA phones are constantly adjusting their transmit power up and down, depending on how well the base station is receiving them. If the BER (Bit Error Rate) is too high, the phone is told to raise its transmit power. If the BER is low, the phone is told to reduce power, in order to reduce the noise. In a CDMA system, you can always add "just one more" transmitter, but eventually the noise floor is raised to the point where calls are dropped.
Also in open RF there are other problems to contend with, that dictate the optimal method of transmission - fading, (transmitter moves behind or out from behind a building) multipath, (Signal takes multiple paths to receiver, resulting in overlap because signals arrive at different times - think of trying to talk across an echoing canyon) and dopplar shifts. (Transmitter is moving, resulting in shifted carrier frequency) In practice, open RF is a pretty crappy transmission medium as compared to any sort of physical link.
In order to preserve optimal use of the spectrum for others, you don't want to transmit omnidirectional. If the receiver is in front of you, the signal you transmit to the sides and back are just wasted transmitter power, and an unwanted noise source for everybody else. Ideally, you only want the signal to go in a laser like path between transmitter and receiver. Very tricky if you don't know where the receiver is, or if it is moving.
Would it be considered cheating?
IBM must be shaking in their boots at SCO's legal onslaught, so they are bolstering their defence! LOL
Yes, but there have been attacks:
a t_ was_then/disasters_tragedies/lortie_gunman
One nut rammed his truck into the front steps at parliament hill a few years back.
A crazed soldier walked into the Quebec legislature 20 years back, and shot the place up - it was just chance that he screwed up the time the legislature was in session, and arrived when the chamber was empty.
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-70-1308-7634-11/th
I guess you could also count the time back in 1916 when the mob burned the centre block to a gutted shell. Despite that, I am glad they don't turn the place into a fortress.
Actually, I wonder how long it will be before somebody cooks up and circulates a patch to uncripple the systems? Should be simple to trace and fix, as it is an artifical, hard coded limit.
And technically it wouldn't be piracy, since you are still running a legit copy of windows, unless they try to enforce leaving the PC in a crippled state as part of the licencing terms. (I wonder how this would fly in the courts)
Here is how to help Darl make his quarter, and pay his lawyers at the same time:
http://mrcybermall.com/millions/
Send him one of these puppies - enough for just over 1430 Linux licences, while supplies last!
Naw, how about calling him Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the RIAA information minister?
Yeah, but at least you can't mod him as off topic in this thread!
> And since you are so against fixed speed limits, what exactly is your solution?
My solution is what is reasonable and prudent under the circumstances. The autobahn is one of the safest highways in the world, with no fixed speed limits.
The more patent heavy corporations that have vested interest in FOSS, the better. This way, if a FOSS unfriendly company decides to launch a patent attack that would be damaging to the bottom line of FOSS friendly companies (IBM, HP, Novell) then it is all the more likely that the attacker will be found in violation of somebody else's patents. We have a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario, and the attacker will be forced to back down. Aside from a FOSS patent fund, the best defence is to have as many patent heavy corporate friends with a vested interest in the success of FOSS as possible.
And that time it recorded me doing 75 MPH, I was vacationing in Montana.
Fixed speed limits are a crock anyway, how does it tell the difference between driving on an icy covered road in a blizzard, and a clear day with dry roads and unlimited visibility, with no traffic? Driving 50 in the first case may be suicide, yet it is legal. Doing 50 on the open highway in clear conditions, you are a traffic impediment.
Never mind that - would it look ok applied to my car?
I wonder about the legalities of issuing these sort of threats against a legally operating business?
http://www.canadianarrow.com/
(I saw their spacecraft during the Hamilton airshow - resembled a V-2 with windows.
for that sunburn I received over the weekend. He had better keep his damned photons off my property!
I expect it will be priced within reach in less than 5 years. When this happens, the spooks will be screwed. Anybody, and everybody will have secure, untappable communications.
Actually, it would be fun to see how many pentium-4's you could fit inside a PDP-11 case.
I miss those 8 inch 100K? floppy drives though - those were the days when floppy lived up to its nam, and the drives made interesting squeaking noises while they were being read. I still have a couple of them downstairs, I was part of the last class that used PDPs before the university retired the old 11/70.
The PDP OS had a weird (and annoying habit) of automatically making numbered backups every time you saved - in theory sounds like a good idea, except with an entire class editing and saving assignments, the main drive ran out of space and the whole system froze every 15 minutes, and we had to hunt down the TA to reboot it. "Delete your files, delete your files" was a cry heard every 5-10 minutes in the lab, lest the whole system hang and die yet again.
Back in the 1970's, that astronomically expensive PDP 11/03 in the Heathkit catalog was my dream machine, as it was the only true 16 bit PC on the market. I even bought the paper tape software and manuals for it!
I know this is OT, but there is nowhere else to post this - I thought I was the only one seeing them. Is it the viruses running rampant, or did something break after their last time they tweaked slashcode?
Will it be a truly "open" format, or just an alternative - open only to members of their club?
isnt' the lack of a pulse, (assuming the device works as intended)
It is carrying around the power supply for this thing, with wires sticking out of your body. Worldheart http://www.worldheart.com/ has been testing an artificial heart that can be powered without a physical connection, but you still have to carry the charger around.
http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/quotes.html
Kind of ranks up there with Bill's quote that "640k ought to be be enough for anybody."
Towards the end of the 19th centry, it was widely believed that they had discovered everything there was to be known about physics.
When the Alvin submarine was sent down to explore the mid ocean ridge, it was widely thought it would be a waste of money, just a silly publicity stunt that couldn't do any real science, and that there was probably nothing worth seeing. But when they got there, they discovered an exotic ecosystem with many hithero unknown and undreamed of species of life thriving at unimaginable temperatures and pressure.
The same sentiments initially existed regarding radio and X-ray astronomy. Why bother, as there is nothing of importance to see?
Robots can do some of the advance work, but there is still no substitute for having a man on the ground. We won't know until we plant feet on new worlds what wonders lie waiting to be discovered.
I must say he has balls - right now the entire internet is being deluged by packet storms from compromised windows machines, (even bringing down google for some folks) and he worries that foreign hackers just *might* compromise the Linux source tree?
Since when did you ever need the kernel source code to root somebody? It has been done to Windows, Solaris, HP/UX and countless other closed source platforms for years.
I have been sort of thinking about this, and how patents are used in industry. Perhaps the intent can be reversed, as are done with software licences under copyleft.
Can we devise something analogous to GPL for a software or hardware patent, so that if you use it in your product or design, then you must provide full source code and/or schematics and/or ensure that all other patents used in the product or software are available under the same terms. Then all open source advocates have to do, is create their own patent portfolio, as long as we can find lawyers willing to help with the filing. We can fight fire with fire, the next time somebody tries to embrace and extend, they will have serious trouble if the interface is protected by a public patent.
Hello, RMS - are you out there? Wanna bite?