Desense with a 500mw transmitter? At 2.4Ghz? The power density at the antenna would hardly be enough to desense the receiver. Further, proper shielding of the antenna feedline and the car body itself should be sufficient to eliminate any harmful radiated power at the receiver front-end.
This is bunk. Smells as if someone is leveraging Sirius' proximity to the band to force WiFi out of the market. Now - who would want that sort of behavior?
Further, Sirius can mod its gear to deal with the problem. Its a significantly smaller problem to deal with the 2 people who actually bought XM rigs than it is to retro the hundreds of thousands of existing 802.11* units in the field. Further, the public good done by WiFi and community nets significantly outweighs the possibility that some spread will occur over the 55mhz gap and periodically cause Sirius hardware to get some crap packets.
Its obviously another case of "The Man" trying to keep us serfs in check.;) Are you American people (me included) going to let this be another case of the public getting the shaft? Or is it simply another Slashdot moment of catharsis?
Don't forget that some folks will pay for professionally produced software if they are guranteed certain levels of support and product quality.
You get what you pay for. Some GPL software will be fantastic, but not all. There will always be a large market for purchasing software. But I'm hoping the nature of the GPL software model will force software vendors to produce quality code, with accountability and realistic pricing (none of this $300 for Windows XP Pro non-upgrade. Or $500 for Photoshop.) I especially hate the part where software companies get off without a warranty.
Recently I've been reading about how an amateur radio based network involving wireless packet data fell apart because a few stations did not organize in the same way as the rest of the network. This isn't the sole reason it fell apart, much of its demise seems to be from apathy.
Understand that amateur radio in the US and in most countries, consists of free (as in beer) but regulated swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum. This spectrum is shared by all amateur radio operators to communicate on using voice, morse code, video, data or some combination. Not unlike the Internet collective of networks, it is a shared resource of interconnected points.
The network in question used a specific frequency to communicate inbetween BBS nodes, and another frequency to communicate between BBSes and end-users. A loosely organized group provided a set of working rules to ensure the network could function efficiently. If BBS to BBS traffic and end-user traffic were shared on the same frequency, the network would bog down in short order (packet switched radio is slow at 1200-9600 bps plus overhead). Splitting the types of traffic up helped to ensure things kept moving.
For whatever reason, a few nodes decided to pass BBS to BBS traffic on the end-user frequency. The constant chatter between these unruly BBSes made it very difficult for end-users to operate making the network nearly unusable. No one was really in the wrong from a legal or regulatory stance, but they were obviously disrupting the function of a "system" and causing headaches for other users of the shared medium.
In US HAM radio, the FCC leaves problems in the hands of the amateurs to sort out. First come, first serve on the frequency. It is illegal to wilfully interfere with stations who are carrying on an active conversation. Written early under the assumption that two people could not possibly talk all day and all night long, the regulation did not account for repeaters. Repeaters are always-on radios mounted in geographically advantageous places to amplify weak radio signals extending their range. Who "owns" the frequency occupied by a repeater? No one. The FCC left it to Hams to coordinate the frequency assignments for a repeater. There is language in the regulations affording precedence when interference occurs with a repeater involving the Ham-run coordination. The problem was handled in the community and repeaters thrive today.
But back to the packet network - while HAMs have shown to be very cooperative folks (albeit ornery) with repeaters, this cooperation did not extend to the packet network. I'm told some terrific arguments used to break out at the meetings of the network group. Compromise, it seemed, was not an option.
Finally, rather than improve the software and hardware to deal with interference, things died down. The network still exists as only a shadow of its former glory - and without advancement.
The Internet infrastructure consists of privately owned equipment, and each owner can choose whether or not they'll cope with something they don't like. But the collective "Internet" that exists only when these networks work together is much like that shared spectrum HAMs use. It only works when the people who own the infrastructure agree to equal access for all traffic and issues should be settled in accordance with the understanding that the Internet is a commons. Anything less is not the "Internet."
Moral Beating: If you don't like SPAM, then adjust your receiver to ignore it. The end-2-end principle should apply. Only the edge device should carry the ability to decide if information is of value or not. IF the SMTP protocol is too open for your tastes, then revise it to become more intelligent. There is nothing wrong with subscribing to blacklists for your own mailbox, but to do so in a manner that blocks mail for those who have no choice in the matter violates the spirit of the end-2-end concept and the spirit of freedom that many in the earlier days of the Internet thought could change society for the better.
Quit bitching, apply your filters and focus on things that really matter.
Perhaps one should be more concerned with protecting the trademark of the DVD logo than the manufacturing of the hardware.
Assuming the trademark is protected, then a consumer can be certain a logo'ed machine is manufactured to compatible specifications.
Back in the old IBM XT/AT days, many different computer vendors built machines compatible with the IBM spec but without IBM parts. It should be no different for a vendor to manufacture a DVD player using generic parts that don't conform to the original design specifications, if that vendor can successfully sell a machine that does the job.
Sorry. When I say "the bit bucket" I mean \dev\null. No buffering. No need to buffer since legitimate hosts (and illegitmate probably,) would retransmit dropped packets. Its a performance killer, but it'd keep you afloat.
Through traffic management (generally called shaping, but I suspect this is vendor specific,) a device intelligently assigns priorities to different types of traffic, and paces packets as they pass through. If a flood of requests come through, the device throttles the bandwidth by rolling off packets in excess from a given host to the bit bucket. Thus, while you may have a flood of inbound hosts, it won't transmit every packet from every host. By keeping the flow down to a manageable level (adjusted by the device owner,) for their server farm, performance is reduced, but systems continue running, requests are serviced, etc.
Further, such intelligent devices could be made to parse headers for matching patterns, and perhaps become a bit smarter about which packets to discard.
For major ISPs, offering this on their end, rather than on the end-ISP's link, would allow the device to saturate the last-mile link with more useful data, rather than so much bogus traffic.
This is all very pie in the sky, yes, but whats the alternative? Laws? No. Laws don't work. ISPs tracking down offenders? Yeah, right.
Look at the current state of virus protection software. In the Wintel camps, especially, viruses are constantly being distributed, warranting an entire business of anti-virus software that must be continually updated.
Next, we'll have an entire business built on tracking down DoS kiddies.
The real solution is securing those armies of zombie daemons that are used to generate the traffic. First it was the "Smurf Amplification" which has been resolved (although far from completely.) Now its software executing on unsecured machines.
What next: Requiring a license to network? I'm still all for a license to own a PC.
Point: The only protection you can count on is your ability to control how your edge network and its devices respond to the data received. If you don't like the way your end devices respond to that traffic, then modify it through software change, or the introduction of in-stream devices to provide flow-management of your bandwidth. In some cases, you must put that flow-management ahead of your pipe, since the goal is to avoid saturating that pipe - and this is something that must be worked out between businesses and their Internet supplier.
Protect the end-to-end nature of the net, for all the trouble it causes, its one of the foundations of freedom on the network.
-b-
I saw a comment in here blaming the Internet's end-to-end design for the ability for individuals to cause such interruptions to service. BUT...
With all the designs available to us today, as engineers, we should be able to employ traffic shaping devices to limit the amount of load any given site can generate on the net. Cache, throttle and filter. We build routers that can switch ungodly amounts of packets per second (obviously enough to flood the link to Cloud 9's boxes.
So why can't Cloud 9 invest in a few black box traffic shapers (I know they exist) to smooth out the requests?
Just where is the point of failure, anyway?
As long as we continue to design our edge devices to be layover victims, we'll always have these problems. The network delivers, the computer abides. Well, perhaps the computer shouldn't be so quick to respond.
SMP is a good idea, if your application is calculation-intensive. If it is merely I/O intensive, then you have another ballgame.
RAID is a good idea for I/O heavy traffic, when that traffic exceeds the capability of a single disk. Caching is an option, but we're looking at a constant stream of new information, rather than reusing existing information. Thus you want a pipeline which can deliver data to the final medium (disk) quickly without eating up additional CPU cycles or unnecessary I/O bandwidth.
RAID-0 is a good choice in this case, with a hardware-based controller and 4 or 5 drives. The data is streamed to the controller at speeds approaching the bus limit, and the controller fans out the load to individual drives without any system overhead.
I don't believe data-guarding (mirroring or parity) is warranted in this case. A workstation does not need 24/7 uptime, and I doubt the application would be able to "pick-up" where it left off if a fatal error occurs. Plus one would expect the products of this process to be backed up immediately to another medium, rather than left on harddisks.
Given: The sole existence of for-profit corporations is to make profits for stockholders.
Given: Corporations seldom look further into the future than quarterly or semi-annually.
Given: Corporations take the clear-cut approach to consumer resources (milk the market dry, then find another market.)
Then: Cooperation is unacceptable because it does not foster the highest amount of return possible within the shortest period of time.
Furthermore, Corporations are collections of humanity, but the collective efforts of the company are inhumane. This is typically due to the dilution of "commonly accepted" ethics and leadership. The legal department does not view the author of DeCSS as a person, but as a threat to revenue figures. The motives and merits of this person's actions are not considered.
Drug companies are often great examples of this. While they have a justifiable need to recoup costs associated with drug research, it is often questionable whether their pricing structures are truly reasonable to the consumer in the end. This goes back to the capitalist vs. socialist argument. I think that capitalism is a fine idea, as long as it is tempered with "commonly-accepted" ethics.
A capitalist society can be beneficial to humanity if, and only if, the participants subscribe to and uphold commonly acceptable ethics. This is to counter the general tendancy of capitalism to shift resources in the direction of a smaller group of people, at the expense of a larger group of people. As long as our society is financially-driven rather than driven by merit (a la Star Trek), we must continue to apply some negative pressure in the form of ethics and compromise in the name of socialism. This does not require mandates, just a less monetary-centric view.
To complement this, I've been reading the "Beggars" series of books by Nancy Kress. The first, "Beggars in Spain" illustrates an alternative view of societal drivers which, while not being the plot of the story itself, does lend itself to further thought. If nothing else, the books have been highly entertaining.
So to make my point clear -
The DVD consortium can not be reasoned with.
Our society is too litigous, trapped in a tunnel-vision directed primarly by greed. The only answer to this problem is to continue breaking down walls that business builds. Our justices are either too decrepit or too corrupt to protect us. Civil disobedience is the only acceptable answer - until we ourselves, or our children, effect positive change.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a great opportunity to call their bluff.
Just tell them to blow off.
I'm quite interested to see what they do.
-b-
Desense with a 500mw transmitter? At 2.4Ghz? The power density at the antenna would hardly be enough to desense the receiver. Further, proper shielding of the antenna feedline and the car body itself should be sufficient to eliminate any harmful radiated power at the receiver front-end.
;) Are you American people (me included) going to let this be another case of the public getting the shaft? Or is it simply another Slashdot moment of catharsis?
This is bunk. Smells as if someone is leveraging Sirius' proximity to the band to force WiFi out of the market. Now - who would want that sort of behavior?
Further, Sirius can mod its gear to deal with the problem. Its a significantly smaller problem to deal with the 2 people who actually bought XM rigs than it is to retro the hundreds of thousands of existing 802.11* units in the field. Further, the public good done by WiFi and community nets significantly outweighs the possibility that some spread will occur over the 55mhz gap and periodically cause Sirius hardware to get some crap packets.
Its obviously another case of "The Man" trying to keep us serfs in check.
Its up to you.
-b-
Don't forget that some folks will pay for professionally produced software if they are guranteed certain levels of support and product quality.
You get what you pay for. Some GPL software will be fantastic, but not all. There will always be a large market for purchasing software. But I'm hoping the nature of the GPL software model will force software vendors to produce quality code, with accountability and realistic pricing (none of this $300 for Windows XP Pro non-upgrade. Or $500 for Photoshop.) I especially hate the part where software companies get off without a warranty.
-b-
Recently I've been reading about how an amateur radio based network involving wireless packet data fell apart because a few stations did not organize in the same way as the rest of the network. This isn't the sole reason it fell apart, much of its demise seems to be from apathy.
Understand that amateur radio in the US and in most countries, consists of free (as in beer) but regulated swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum. This spectrum is shared by all amateur radio operators to communicate on using voice, morse code, video, data or some combination. Not unlike the Internet collective of networks, it is a shared resource of interconnected points.
The network in question used a specific frequency to communicate inbetween BBS nodes, and another frequency to communicate between BBSes and end-users. A loosely organized group provided a set of working rules to ensure the network could function efficiently. If BBS to BBS traffic and end-user traffic were shared on the same frequency, the network would bog down in short order (packet switched radio is slow at 1200-9600 bps plus overhead). Splitting the types of traffic up helped to ensure things kept moving.
For whatever reason, a few nodes decided to pass BBS to BBS traffic on the end-user frequency. The constant chatter between these unruly BBSes made it very difficult for end-users to operate making the network nearly unusable. No one was really in the wrong from a legal or regulatory stance, but they were obviously disrupting the function of a "system" and causing headaches for other users of the shared medium.
In US HAM radio, the FCC leaves problems in the hands of the amateurs to sort out. First come, first serve on the frequency. It is illegal to wilfully interfere with stations who are carrying on an active conversation. Written early under the assumption that two people could not possibly talk all day and all night long, the regulation did not account for repeaters. Repeaters are always-on radios mounted in geographically advantageous places to amplify weak radio signals extending their range. Who "owns" the frequency occupied by a repeater? No one. The FCC left it to Hams to coordinate the frequency assignments for a repeater. There is language in the regulations affording precedence when interference occurs with a repeater involving the Ham-run coordination. The problem was handled in the community and repeaters thrive today.
But back to the packet network - while HAMs have shown to be very cooperative folks (albeit ornery) with repeaters, this cooperation did not extend to the packet network. I'm told some terrific arguments used to break out at the meetings of the network group. Compromise, it seemed, was not an option.
Finally, rather than improve the software and hardware to deal with interference, things died down. The network still exists as only a shadow of its former glory - and without advancement.
The Internet infrastructure consists of privately owned equipment, and each owner can choose whether or not they'll cope with something they don't like. But the collective "Internet" that exists only when these networks work together is much like that shared spectrum HAMs use. It only works when the people who own the infrastructure agree to equal access for all traffic and issues should be settled in accordance with the understanding that the Internet is a commons. Anything less is not the "Internet."
Moral Beating:
If you don't like SPAM, then adjust your receiver to ignore it. The end-2-end principle should apply. Only the edge device should carry the ability to decide if information is of value or not. IF the SMTP protocol is too open for your tastes, then revise it to become more intelligent.
There is nothing wrong with subscribing to blacklists for your own mailbox, but to do so in a manner that blocks mail for those who have no choice in the matter violates the spirit of the end-2-end concept and the spirit of freedom that many in the earlier days of the Internet thought could change society for the better.
Quit bitching, apply your filters and focus on things that really matter.
-b-
Perhaps one should be more concerned with protecting the trademark of the DVD logo than the manufacturing of the hardware.
Assuming the trademark is protected, then a consumer can be certain a logo'ed machine is manufactured to compatible specifications.
Back in the old IBM XT/AT days, many different computer vendors built machines compatible with the IBM spec but without IBM parts. It should be no different for a vendor to manufacture a DVD player using generic parts that don't conform to the original design specifications, if that vendor can successfully sell a machine that does the job.
Sorry. When I say "the bit bucket" I mean \dev\null. No buffering. No need to buffer since legitimate hosts (and illegitmate probably,) would retransmit dropped packets. Its a performance killer, but it'd keep you afloat.
-b-
The concept I'm pointing out is:
Through traffic management (generally called shaping, but I suspect this is vendor specific,) a device intelligently assigns priorities to different types of traffic, and paces packets as they pass through. If a flood of requests come through, the device throttles the bandwidth by rolling off packets in excess from a given host to the bit bucket. Thus, while you may have a flood of inbound hosts, it won't transmit every packet from every host. By keeping the flow down to a manageable level (adjusted by the device owner,) for their server farm, performance is reduced, but systems continue running, requests are serviced, etc.
Further, such intelligent devices could be made to parse headers for matching patterns, and perhaps become a bit smarter about which packets to discard.
For major ISPs, offering this on their end, rather than on the end-ISP's link, would allow the device to saturate the last-mile link with more useful data, rather than so much bogus traffic.
This is all very pie in the sky, yes, but whats the alternative? Laws? No. Laws don't work. ISPs tracking down offenders? Yeah, right.
Look at the current state of virus protection software. In the Wintel camps, especially, viruses are constantly being distributed, warranting an entire business of anti-virus software that must be continually updated.
Next, we'll have an entire business built on tracking down DoS kiddies.
The real solution is securing those armies of zombie daemons that are used to generate the traffic. First it was the "Smurf Amplification" which has been resolved (although far from completely.) Now its software executing on unsecured machines.
What next: Requiring a license to network? I'm still all for a license to own a PC.
Point: The only protection you can count on is your ability to control how your edge network and its devices respond to the data received. If you don't like the way your end devices respond to that traffic, then modify it through software change, or the introduction of in-stream devices to provide flow-management of your bandwidth. In some cases, you must put that flow-management ahead of your pipe, since the goal is to avoid saturating that pipe - and this is something that must be worked out between businesses and their Internet supplier.
Protect the end-to-end nature of the net, for all the trouble it causes, its one of the foundations of freedom on the network.
-b-
I saw a comment in here blaming the Internet's end-to-end design for the ability for individuals to cause such interruptions to service. BUT...
With all the designs available to us today, as engineers, we should be able to employ traffic shaping devices to limit the amount of load any given site can generate on the net. Cache, throttle and filter. We build routers that can switch ungodly amounts of packets per second (obviously enough to flood the link to Cloud 9's boxes.
So why can't Cloud 9 invest in a few black box traffic shapers (I know they exist) to smooth out the requests?
Just where is the point of failure, anyway?
As long as we continue to design our edge devices to be layover victims, we'll always have these problems. The network delivers, the computer abides. Well, perhaps the computer shouldn't be so quick to respond.
-b-
SMP is a good idea, if your application is calculation-intensive. If it is merely I/O intensive, then you have another ballgame.
RAID is a good idea for I/O heavy traffic, when that traffic exceeds the capability of a single disk. Caching is an option, but we're looking at a constant stream of new information, rather than reusing existing information. Thus you want a pipeline which can deliver data to the final medium (disk) quickly without eating up additional CPU cycles or unnecessary I/O bandwidth.
RAID-0 is a good choice in this case, with a hardware-based controller and 4 or 5 drives. The data is streamed to the controller at speeds approaching the bus limit, and the controller fans out the load to individual drives without any system overhead.
I don't believe data-guarding (mirroring or parity) is warranted in this case. A workstation does not need 24/7 uptime, and I doubt the application would be able to "pick-up" where it left off if a fatal error occurs. Plus one would expect the products of this process to be backed up immediately to another medium, rather than left on harddisks.
-b-
In my humble opinion (IMHO) -
Given: The sole existence of for-profit corporations is to make profits for stockholders.
Given: Corporations seldom look further into the future than quarterly or semi-annually.
Given: Corporations take the clear-cut approach to consumer resources (milk the market dry, then find another market.)
Then: Cooperation is unacceptable because it does not foster the highest amount of return possible within the shortest period of time.
Furthermore, Corporations are collections of humanity, but the collective efforts of the company are inhumane. This is typically due to the dilution of "commonly accepted" ethics and leadership. The legal department does not view the author of DeCSS as a person, but as a threat to revenue figures. The motives and merits of this person's actions are not considered.
Drug companies are often great examples of this. While they have a justifiable need to recoup costs associated with drug research, it is often questionable whether their pricing structures are truly reasonable to the consumer in the end. This goes back to the capitalist vs. socialist argument. I think that capitalism is a fine idea, as long as it is tempered with "commonly-accepted" ethics.
A capitalist society can be beneficial to humanity if, and only if, the participants subscribe to and uphold commonly acceptable ethics. This is to counter the general tendancy of capitalism to shift resources in the direction of a smaller group of people, at the expense of a larger group of people. As long as our society is financially-driven rather than driven by merit (a la Star Trek), we must continue to apply some negative pressure in the form of ethics and compromise in the name of socialism. This does not require mandates, just a less monetary-centric view.
To complement this, I've been reading the "Beggars" series of books by Nancy Kress. The first, "Beggars in Spain" illustrates an alternative view of societal drivers which, while not being the plot of the story itself, does lend itself to further thought. If nothing else, the books have been highly entertaining.
So to make my point clear -
The DVD consortium can not be reasoned with.
Our society is too litigous, trapped in a tunnel-vision directed primarly by greed. The only answer to this problem is to continue breaking down walls that business builds. Our justices are either too decrepit or too corrupt to protect us. Civil disobedience is the only acceptable answer - until we ourselves, or our children, effect positive change.
Be quiet, not silent!
-b-