I work with a lot of wireless APs and client cards in our lab.
If you are talking about G type stuff, stay away from Linksys, they have the crappiest range. When I used it in my house, I would get 68db with an Intel 802.11b AP, but the Linksys G router/AP yielded 77db, and that was only going through 2 walls.
I replaced it with a Netgear WGR614, which uses the Intersil Prism GT chipset (as does the D-Link we tested), and got much better range. Similar to straight B. ~68 or 69 db in my master bedroom.
In our office environment, the Linsys G would drop signal after walking past the conference rooms. The Netgear G allowed us to almost walk around the entire floor. I connected a signal booster, and found it to be next to worthless, as it did not improve range. If it did, only by 5 ft or so. It still dropped signal as I walked past the conference rooms.
The measured actual throughput was 4.5mb/s with straight 802.11b, and 21mb/s with the Netgear G.
Quite suprisingly, I had the best results with the Netgear WAB102 Dualband A/B, which is the only A/B AP that uses Atheros second generation A. Tom's Hardware had a write-up on this. Atheros had a whitepaper. I bought 3 of these, and verified the claims.
With a Linksys A+G card, (which uses Atheros 5001X+, as does Netgear WAG511), I got slightly weaker signal strength in my master bedroom 70db), but throughput killed both B and G. I was measuring 24mb/sec throughput in non-turbo mode, and 45mb/sec in turbo mode. In the office, I was able to sustain 7-11mb/sec at the opposite end of the building. The Netgear G was only able to sustain 1-2mb/s. Inside the conf rooms, Linksys G had no signal, Netgear G sustained 7mb/sec, Netgear A in turbo mode sustained 24mb/sec.
In the office, the range of this second generation A actually exceeded that of B, which is something Atheros pointed out in their whitepaper. They said while true A can't go through walls as well as B, the 1st generation A was not performing up to its capabilities. Kind of like how Shannon's law states what is the maximum amount of data that can be carried across wireless, but current technology does not even begin to approach this limit.
I've tested various client cards from Orinoco, to Cisco Aeronet, Prism 2 and Prism 3 cards, and various Atheros based cards. I that the AP affected range more often than the client cards. Though I have found that anything based on the Atmel chipset to be crap. The USB 802.11 card from Linksys (V2.6) uses this chipset. Unfortunately, the Netgear WAB102, uses Atmel for its B, so its B is crap as well. I just use the A portion of it anyways. But the new Netgear triband router, I beleive uses Atheros for all three bands, it just costs an arm and a leg.
The Linksys Triband AP, only uses Atheros for the A, it uses Broadcom for B and G, so its G sucks just like the Linksys B/G stuff.
Somewhere I also read that Linksys will not support any turbo modes in their AP/Routers. (though their A+G client card still supports turbo). Both Atheros and Intersil have planned turbo features. Atheros already had 108mb/s A support in turbo, allowing 45mb/sec throughput by using multiple channels. They already have support for hardware compression, so are promissing a future firmware update that will flip this on, that will allow a turbo mode to sustain 90mb/sec throughput. Its called SuperA. They just released SuperG, which uses multiple B/G channels and compression, to allow 108mb/sec, and I think 45-60mb/sec throughput.
Intersil's turbo technology is called Nitro. Similar (but incompatible) with Atheros's technology.
When I first graduated, I worked at a financial software company. I think I was the only one in the department that had a CS degree.
It was almost a daily battle with upper management, because they disliked how I was not in the product development group, but most of the modules I was writing was replacing the core modules, because my manager/clients/etc realized that my modules were more efficient and flexible. One time the development guys got pissed, because I wrote my own month-end module, that used a more efficient data structure to store all the data. The processing time got cut from 7 hours to a few minutes!
Anyways, when the economy crashed my manager had the bright idea that I would have a much easier time finding a job than my peers, so I was one of the first let go. In retrospect, leaving that dump was the best thing that ever happened to me. However, looking back, from their perspective it was probably a poor business decision, as I kept up with friend from there and such. They had a hellish time making up for my loss.
Anyways, after working there, it scares the crap out of me to think that company was #1 in its particular industry, and yet they had such crappy design principles and developers.
I remember one such bug, where the idiot developer could not grasp the concept of having a development environment vs testing on a live system. Consequently one of our government customers got their system hosed by this guy, because his program royally fscked up the database. This agency ended up losing 6 years worth of data, because it also turns out this program has been miscalculating payments for the last 6 years unnoticed. (And you wonder where our govt spends our money!) I'm surprised we didn't get sued into bankruptcy.
what version of windows are you running? Any chance you are running win2k?
Just curious, I checked all my boxes here (XP and 2003), and none have the 8mb left over.
I take back what I said about booting from CD. Now that I remember, when you don't boot off the CD, it won't let you delete the system partition, and it tells you it can't because it copied install information.
I think my 8mb left over problem disappeared when I upgraded from Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003.
None of my XP boxes have this problem, so I wouldn't know what to tell you, if your boxes are XP.
I think that only happens when you don't boot from the CD during install, and you tell it to reformat your system partition. That 8mb partition is used to boot the kernal.
When I booted from the CD and reformatted the system partition, I did not have this 8mb left over.
those systems that ship with 128mb or more of memory, but in the fine print says part of it is shared with the Video Card.
I remember a long time ago my IBM PCjr had 128k of memory, but 16k of it was shared with the display card, such that only 112 was available. Consequently, many PC software apps that required 128k of ram didn't work. Thank god for the sidecar memory expansion kit:)
If you were going to sue the automakers, at least sue them for making the Speedomoter and/or fuel gage inaccurate.
I read an article Consumer Reports a while back saying the european makers are the worst when it comes to the speedo reading a speed that is higher than what you are traveling. I remember it saying that for post 1995 cars, GM had the most accurate speedos with dead-on readings at 60 and overstated by 1mph at 100mph, followed by Toyota and Honda which overstated the speed by 2 at 60mph and 5 mph at 100, with BMW being the worst by overstating by 10mph at 60 and 100.
And pretty much everyone understates how much gas you actually have left.
Imagine the pain that would happen if one day cars actually ran out of gas when the needle hit the E?
I remember when that movie came out, (it as Rated R), there was a scene where the kids lay down on a street on the yellow lines. I remember afterwards, some real kids did the same thing and were killed.
I vaguely remember the parents suing, and I think they won if I remember.
Now I also remember a separate article saying that the video game rating system doesn't hold any meat, like the MPAA rating system does. That being the case, if the MPAA rating system didn't absolve liability, why should the game rating system?
I totally agree. I'm just saying that its a little stupid for a company complain about the costs of maintaining servers for free, when they are doing just that in another group.
(Complaining about Yahoo IM Servers costing money to maintain, yet continue to offer YahooMail for free, etc)
Ditto for MSN? Since when do you have to shell out money to use MSN Messenger?
What incentive does MS have to provide free email? Especially considering you used to be able to access the email from a regular email client for free? Or that you could alter your.hosts file, to try and rid yourself of all those banners?
But don't you still need a Yahoo account to IM with? When you sign up for a Yahoo account, you are still signing up with a Yahoo account.
Isn't this like arguing that if I sign up for a Yahoo account, I should use Yahoo's browser to check my email, instead of IE, Netscape, or [name your favorite browser]?
There are still adds when you log into yahoo to check your email. They still have your information. Etc etc etc.
If it costs so much to run an IM server, and they cannot recoup their costs, perhaps they need to rethink their business model. Perhaps they need to overhaul the system altogether and design a protocol that is cheaper to maintain, etc.
But with P2P networks, doesn't the receiver still have to make some sort of effort to try and find the stuff, and then download it? It's not like it takes 2 seconds to download it. Oftentimes it could take a few hours, even days or weeks to find and download something particular.
Lets say I record Justin Timberlake off the radio. Then I make a copy of it and start handing them out. Whats the difference between this, and if those other people recorded it off the radio too. End result is the same, multiple people with copies of the same song.
Hell FOX even says you can copy broadcasted shows from friends. So why is copying from one broadcast medium ok and another not?
Now before anyone says, "Oh, but if you copy the CD and share it, you are sharing songs that were not broadcasted", let me respond...
If you look at the music shared on Kazaa, most of it is the stuff that gets airplay. I have yet to see any songs from CDs that I own being shared by other users on Kazaa that did not get airtime. Besides, I heard that most of the "popular" songs on P2P are the radio-mix version anyways, which you can only get from the radio most of the time.
Heck, I could even say, "I didn't make multiple copies, I just recorded the same song off the radio on multiple occasions..."
Of course, I'm not saying I condone piracy or anything, just saying....:)
Not that I pirate or condone piracy, but I'll never understand why:
If I record a song/tv show off the radio or TV, then let a friend borrow and copy it, why this is illegal.
This friend could've recorded the song/tv show off the radio/tv themselves.
I suppose you could make an argument over different markets, but lets face it. For pretty much all the popular songs floating around p2p these days, they pretty much play in every market, as every market has a "popular" radio station. All probably owned by ClearChannel too.
I know people have been making arguments about perfect copies and such. But MP3s are lossy. And many of the songs are floating on P2P before the CDs are even released, so they were probably recorded off the radio anyways. Besides, I heard that most of the MP3s floating around P2P are only 128kbit/sec recordings anyways...
Or does anyone else vaugely remember some guy trying to sue the automakes over the windshield wiper, and lost because they design was sufficiently changed, despite functionality being unaltered?
Anyways, to keep with the analogy, GM could sue the other automakers over the Automatic Transmission, electric Starter, etc. Granted, they were the first to use the electric starter, not so sure they invented it. But they did invent the autotranny, as it says so on their history/museum stuff... Hell, on their history page, it says they were the first to offer airbags back in the 70's... And they also invented the modern day Crash Test dummy in wide use today....
Like how AMD used to license the masks from Intel to build some of the old processors? I don't see anyone bitching about all the X86 clones there used to be, that were "functional" equivelants...
The PC will have a battery built into it that will power the computer long enough to force the PC into hibernation. When the power is restored, you won't be "rebooting" the PC, it will just reload state.
I'm guessing you are thinking of the word reboot in the technical sense, as yes, you are going to be going through a POST sequence and such.
I wouldn't be surprised, if as part of this technology, the POST sequence can be skipped in this particular scenario, since the technology is in the chipset/motherboard.
Yeah isn't it funny how all of the "great" Disney movies were nothing more than remakes of old stories, legends, etc that are in the public domain, and yet they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent their own works from ever going into the public domain?
But thats a whole nother' thread...
Anyways, I'm sure one could easily argue that sometimes people benafit from pirating. I'm sure if college kids didn't rampantly pirate MS Office and Windows, Microsoft wouldn't have the market share that it currently does, and these same kids wouldn't be "locked" into Office and other such software as adults.
Heck, in college I had a cracked version of Warcraft II that I played all the time. I loved that game so much what did I do later on? I bought StarCraft and WarCraft III.
Slashdot Mirror
I work with a lot of wireless APs and client cards in our lab.
If you are talking about G type stuff, stay away from Linksys, they have the crappiest range. When I used it in my house, I would get 68db with an Intel 802.11b AP, but the Linksys G router/AP yielded 77db, and that was only going through 2 walls.
I replaced it with a Netgear WGR614, which uses the Intersil Prism GT chipset (as does the D-Link we tested), and got much better range. Similar to straight B. ~68 or 69 db in my master bedroom.
In our office environment, the Linsys G would drop signal after walking past the conference rooms. The Netgear G allowed us to almost walk around the entire floor. I connected a signal booster, and found it to be next to worthless, as it did not improve range. If it did, only by 5 ft or so. It still dropped signal as I walked past the conference rooms.
The measured actual throughput was 4.5mb/s with straight 802.11b, and 21mb/s with the Netgear G.
Quite suprisingly, I had the best results with the Netgear WAB102 Dualband A/B, which is the only A/B AP that uses Atheros second generation A. Tom's Hardware had a write-up on this. Atheros had a whitepaper. I bought 3 of these, and verified the claims.
With a Linksys A+G card, (which uses Atheros 5001X+, as does Netgear WAG511), I got slightly weaker signal strength in my master bedroom 70db), but throughput killed both B and G. I was measuring 24mb/sec throughput in non-turbo mode, and 45mb/sec in turbo mode. In the office, I was able to sustain 7-11mb/sec at the opposite end of the building. The Netgear G was only able to sustain 1-2mb/s. Inside the conf rooms, Linksys G had no signal, Netgear G sustained 7mb/sec, Netgear A in turbo mode sustained 24mb/sec.
In the office, the range of this second generation A actually exceeded that of B, which is something Atheros pointed out in their whitepaper. They said while true A can't go through walls as well as B, the 1st generation A was not performing up to its capabilities. Kind of like how Shannon's law states what is the maximum amount of data that can be carried across wireless, but current technology does not even begin to approach this limit.
I've tested various client cards from Orinoco, to Cisco Aeronet, Prism 2 and Prism 3 cards, and various Atheros based cards. I that the AP affected range more often than the client cards. Though I have found that anything based on the Atmel chipset to be crap. The USB 802.11 card from Linksys (V2.6) uses this chipset. Unfortunately, the Netgear WAB102, uses Atmel for its B, so its B is crap as well. I just use the A portion of it anyways. But the new Netgear triband router, I beleive uses Atheros for all three bands, it just costs an arm and a leg.
The Linksys Triband AP, only uses Atheros for the A, it uses Broadcom for B and G, so its G sucks just like the Linksys B/G stuff.
Somewhere I also read that Linksys will not support any turbo modes in their AP/Routers. (though their A+G client card still supports turbo). Both Atheros and Intersil have planned turbo features. Atheros already had 108mb/s A support in turbo, allowing 45mb/sec throughput by using multiple channels. They already have support for hardware compression, so are promissing a future firmware update that will flip this on, that will allow a turbo mode to sustain 90mb/sec throughput. Its called SuperA. They just released SuperG, which uses multiple B/G channels and compression, to allow 108mb/sec, and I think 45-60mb/sec throughput.
Intersil's turbo technology is called Nitro. Similar (but incompatible) with Atheros's technology.
If your microwave "leaks" that much radiation, you have bigger problems to worry about than through-put ;)
Kinda like how Henry ford said, "You can have the Model-T in any color you want, so long as its black"
When I first graduated, I worked at a financial software company. I think I was the only one in the department that had a CS degree.
It was almost a daily battle with upper management, because they disliked how I was not in the product development group, but most of the modules I was writing was replacing the core modules, because my manager/clients/etc realized that my modules were more efficient and flexible. One time the development guys got pissed, because I wrote my own month-end module, that used a more efficient data structure to store all the data. The processing time got cut from 7 hours to a few minutes!
Anyways, when the economy crashed my manager had the bright idea that I would have a much easier time finding a job than my peers, so I was one of the first let go. In retrospect, leaving that dump was the best thing that ever happened to me. However, looking back, from their perspective it was probably a poor business decision, as I kept up with friend from there and such. They had a hellish time making up for my loss.
Anyways, after working there, it scares the crap out of me to think that company was #1 in its particular industry, and yet they had such crappy design principles and developers.
I remember one such bug, where the idiot developer could not grasp the concept of having a development environment vs testing on a live system. Consequently one of our government customers got their system hosed by this guy, because his program royally fscked up the database. This agency ended up losing 6 years worth of data, because it also turns out this program has been miscalculating payments for the last 6 years unnoticed. (And you wonder where our govt spends our money!) I'm surprised we didn't get sued into bankruptcy.
I cut the tags off my pillows and the feds didn't come busting in. I also recorded a bunch of NBA games without the express written consent.....
you can make one yourself for 2 bucks. Or if you are too lazy to make one, just buy this cantenna for 20 bucks.
what version of windows are you running? Any chance you are running win2k?
Just curious, I checked all my boxes here (XP and 2003), and none have the 8mb left over.
I take back what I said about booting from CD. Now that I remember, when you don't boot off the CD, it won't let you delete the system partition, and it tells you it can't because it copied install information.
I think my 8mb left over problem disappeared when I upgraded from Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003.
None of my XP boxes have this problem, so I wouldn't know what to tell you, if your boxes are XP.
I think that only happens when you don't boot from the CD during install, and you tell it to reformat your system partition. That 8mb partition is used to boot the kernal.
When I booted from the CD and reformatted the system partition, I did not have this 8mb left over.
those systems that ship with 128mb or more of memory, but in the fine print says part of it is shared with the Video Card.
:)
I remember a long time ago my IBM PCjr had 128k of memory, but 16k of it was shared with the display card, such that only 112 was available. Consequently, many PC software apps that required 128k of ram didn't work. Thank god for the sidecar memory expansion kit
If you were going to sue the automakers, at least sue them for making the Speedomoter and/or fuel gage inaccurate.
I read an article Consumer Reports a while back saying the european makers are the worst when it comes to the speedo reading a speed that is higher than what you are traveling. I remember it saying that for post 1995 cars, GM had the most accurate speedos with dead-on readings at 60 and overstated by 1mph at 100mph, followed by Toyota and Honda which overstated the speed by 2 at 60mph and 5 mph at 100, with BMW being the worst by overstating by 10mph at 60 and 100.
And pretty much everyone understates how much gas you actually have left.
Imagine the pain that would happen if one day cars actually ran out of gas when the needle hit the E?
Yeah, I have. I just rebuilt my deck, and the 2X4 really were 2" x 4" and the 2X6 really were 2" x 6". Where the hell do you buy your wood? :)
They should just follow AMD and Cyrix...
:)
Call their newest Harddrive the 2000+ or something
Not to mention you can get in more trouble, get more fines, and face longer jail terms for sharing music on Kazaa then being a pedophile/rapist.
Just like how every sane person knows that smoking is bad for you right? ;)
I remember when that movie came out, (it as Rated R), there was a scene where the kids lay down on a street on the yellow lines. I remember afterwards, some real kids did the same thing and were killed.
I vaguely remember the parents suing, and I think they won if I remember.
Now I also remember a separate article saying that the video game rating system doesn't hold any meat, like the MPAA rating system does. That being the case, if the MPAA rating system didn't absolve liability, why should the game rating system?
I totally agree. I'm just saying that its a little stupid for a company complain about the costs of maintaining servers for free, when they are doing just that in another group.
(Complaining about Yahoo IM Servers costing money to maintain, yet continue to offer YahooMail for free, etc)
Ditto for MSN? Since when do you have to shell out money to use MSN Messenger?
.hosts file, to try and rid yourself of all those banners?
What incentive does MS have to provide free email? Especially considering you used to be able to access the email from a regular email client for free? Or that you could alter your
But don't you still need a Yahoo account to IM with? When you sign up for a Yahoo account, you are still signing up with a Yahoo account.
Isn't this like arguing that if I sign up for a Yahoo account, I should use Yahoo's browser to check my email, instead of IE, Netscape, or [name your favorite browser]?
There are still adds when you log into yahoo to check your email. They still have your information. Etc etc etc.
If it costs so much to run an IM server, and they cannot recoup their costs, perhaps they need to rethink their business model. Perhaps they need to overhaul the system altogether and design a protocol that is cheaper to maintain, etc.
But with P2P networks, doesn't the receiver still have to make some sort of effort to try and find the stuff, and then download it? It's not like it takes 2 seconds to download it. Oftentimes it could take a few hours, even days or weeks to find and download something particular.
Lets say I record Justin Timberlake off the radio. Then I make a copy of it and start handing them out. Whats the difference between this, and if those other people recorded it off the radio too. End result is the same, multiple people with copies of the same song.
:)
Hell FOX even says you can copy broadcasted shows from friends. So why is copying from one broadcast medium ok and another not?
Now before anyone says, "Oh, but if you copy the CD and share it, you are sharing songs that were not broadcasted", let me respond...
If you look at the music shared on Kazaa, most of it is the stuff that gets airplay. I have yet to see any songs from CDs that I own being shared by other users on Kazaa that did not get airtime. Besides, I heard that most of the "popular" songs on P2P are the radio-mix version anyways, which you can only get from the radio most of the time.
Heck, I could even say, "I didn't make multiple copies, I just recorded the same song off the radio on multiple occasions..."
Of course, I'm not saying I condone piracy or anything, just saying....
Not that I pirate or condone piracy, but I'll never understand why:
If I record a song/tv show off the radio or TV, then let a friend borrow and copy it, why this is illegal.
This friend could've recorded the song/tv show off the radio/tv themselves.
I suppose you could make an argument over different markets, but lets face it. For pretty much all the popular songs floating around p2p these days, they pretty much play in every market, as every market has a "popular" radio station. All probably owned by ClearChannel too.
I know people have been making arguments about perfect copies and such. But MP3s are lossy. And many of the songs are floating on P2P before the CDs are even released, so they were probably recorded off the radio anyways. Besides, I heard that most of the MP3s floating around P2P are only 128kbit/sec recordings anyways...
Or does anyone else vaugely remember some guy trying to sue the automakes over the windshield wiper, and lost because they design was sufficiently changed, despite functionality being unaltered?
Anyways, to keep with the analogy, GM could sue the other automakers over the Automatic Transmission, electric Starter, etc. Granted, they were the first to use the electric starter, not so sure they invented it. But they did invent the autotranny, as it says so on their history/museum stuff... Hell, on their history page, it says they were the first to offer airbags back in the 70's... And they also invented the modern day Crash Test dummy in wide use today....
Like how AMD used to license the masks from Intel to build some of the old processors? I don't see anyone bitching about all the X86 clones there used to be, that were "functional" equivelants...
The PC will have a battery built into it that will power the computer long enough to force the PC into hibernation. When the power is restored, you won't be "rebooting" the PC, it will just reload state.
I'm guessing you are thinking of the word reboot in the technical sense, as yes, you are going to be going through a POST sequence and such.
I wouldn't be surprised, if as part of this technology, the POST sequence can be skipped in this particular scenario, since the technology is in the chipset/motherboard.
Yeah isn't it funny how all of the "great" Disney movies were nothing more than remakes of old stories, legends, etc that are in the public domain, and yet they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent their own works from ever going into the public domain?
But thats a whole nother' thread...
Anyways, I'm sure one could easily argue that sometimes people benafit from pirating. I'm sure if college kids didn't rampantly pirate MS Office and Windows, Microsoft wouldn't have the market share that it currently does, and these same kids wouldn't be "locked" into Office and other such software as adults.
Heck, in college I had a cracked version of Warcraft II that I played all the time. I loved that game so much what did I do later on? I bought StarCraft and WarCraft III.