Some of your points are valid, but the corporate "not taking all in one machines seriously" is way off. My company's been buying a standard "class" of machine from Lenovo for each "type" of worker for years. Tech support has one laptop and one desktop option, Enginering has another set, Sales another, but all from the same manufacturer, and RARELY upgraded later on... just replaced after a few years when they start to die and cost too much money to keep on a service contract. It's not the "all in one" that companies don't take seriously, it's the fact that they're utterly and hopelessly stuck (maybe by choice) on Windows servers and Outlook/Exchange. It works for them. I just use the laptop they provide for work stuff, and have all Macs at home, complete with VMs for Windows or whatever I feel like... I see the corporation's machines as dated, incapable of running "everything", and slow... and usually with a whole lot less screen real-estate for the same price as I buy at home... even buying Macs. Want me to run Outlook? Sure boss... stick it here in my VM on this real machine that has a command line and a shell, and can run any OS out there! (Of course, they're not interested in that either... way too much loss of security policy and control... for corporate tastes.) A few friends work for progressive enough and small enough shops that when they asked to use their Macs, that was the answer... "as long as you can run Outlook in a VM for scheduling/whatever". Fine...
A half-joking prediction -- what do you bet Apple buys someone like Drobo or just builds their own prior to Snow Leopard's release, just to try to gather in the "I hate that there's no slots in this thing" crowd? Or perhaps a dual or quad drive Time Capsule? They often pay attention when the dumb-beat of whining gets high enough, but they rarely do it the way you think they're going to...
His point is, they're a business -- not basement hackers. Put together a hackintosh in your basement all of your own volition, and who's going to know or care? Certainly not Apple. Publish how to do it, or attempt to sell a product based on their work -- plan on being sued off the planet. Nothing "evil" about it, unless you're bought into the RMS kook-aid... yeah, I said kook. I'll get modded "Flamebait" for it, but I don't see anything "evil" in Apple tightly controlling THEIR product. Anyone wants to make something better, the open-sores community has been promising that for a couple of decades now... and continually under-delivering.
Let's see, the 20" iMac is on the coffee table in the living room... I'll just run right out and get a tower and stuff it under... oh, yeah... that won't fit there.
A single power cord with one of those rubber "speed bump" protectors over it out from under the couch, up the corner of the coffee table, and the Apple wireless keyboard and mouse... and it just sits there, looks good, and works as something not hideous to look at.
Actually, they're quite clear on their investor conference calls that they're about growth and profit.
"Market share" is horse-crap marketing speak for "we sold a lot of stuff, but we didn't make any money doing it". It doesn't always mean that you're profitable in your business ventures.
Um, actually -- that's correct. The average computer user is completely baffled when presented with the myriad of options available on PC's these days, and has to go FIND a professional friend or relative to ask, "What the hell is really important?" You know this to be true, if you have any non-technical friends... they've asked you.
I'm generally a computing (not Mac, not WinTel, not Linux) fan-boy, and enjoy them all... but you have to hand it to Apple... they do know how to SIMPLIFY the purchasing and decision-making process for things that just don't matter to most folks.
They've also recently added simply "Back to my Drive" type functionality for their Time Capsule... how many people who are NON-technical can you think of would just love to be able to fire up their laptop and get files off their personal 1TB hard disk at home, WITHOUT thinking about it. Pay someone $100 a year to take care of that crap (we techies all know there's free and almost free ways to do it that are probably "better" to us, but seriously... $100 a year is nothing if you DON'T know how), and get on with life. Do things important to you and IGNORE the computer...
THAT is the experience Apple strives for... computing that doesn't feel like computing and doesn't present the end-user with too many unnecessary or marginal options that in the end, us techies argue incessantly online about the virtues of, even as the technology is being replaced with the next "thing".
Obviously the whole thing's not going to end well. End it like a friend of mine did when a company royally screwed him over. Walk back to your desk, strip to your skin, and walk out... naked. Everyone in the industry to this day knows EXACTLY why he left, and no matter what the company officially says, his action and the reasons for it were never forgotten by anyone, ten years later.
Outlook = E-mail and calendar, something iPhone does just fine. Word = What are you doing editing documents on a phone? If you just need to read them, who cares? Excel = Maybe the only thing you might complain about on an iPhone, but who the hell does real business spreadsheets on a phone...?
Reality is... you're just as bought into the Windows mobile hype as some people are bought into the iPhone hype. No one uses a phone to do real work on things... it's just a viewport into existing documents and a way to keep in touch with e-mail.
Not to mention commercial broadcast is still alive and kicking, and as interconnected to both nationally syndicated content and local content, all in the same spectrum. The onset of Sirius/XM helped them figure out how to drastically cut costs (fat) and also to figure out time to work out their advertising contracts so they could also stream to the Net... so now they have "continuity" both in having a mix of local/national content, but also in that you can transition from a traditional AM/FM receiver to say, and iPhone with only a little synchronization/buffering change-over time... get out of the car, stream it from the phone... go in the house, turn back on the receiver in there, or keep listening on the phone. Same content, local hosts and personalities involved in the local community. Whether music stations that are involved in supporting local artists, or talk radio with local discussion -- they figured out how they'll make their "comeback" against Satellite-based services, which no one needs unless they're WAY out in the boonies. Now they start converting to digital, and use sub-carriers for more "focused" content that not all listeners can hear at first... they're golden until broadband is truly "everywhere" via cellular. In fact, they have the infrastructure to use their sub-carrier digital stuff as the wide-area TRANSPORT mechanism for the cellular carriers for things like streaming content where everyone's viewing/listening to the same streams...
A percentage share of the profits or the cost-savings, and public acknowledgment that they did something good for the company.
The same thing the execs want for starting/running the company.
Not really all that hard to figure out (or to do), but most companies lose sight of it beyond about 300 staff members, and start using "incentives" that create negative real results, but make the hoardes of middle managers feel better that they have something to measure with "metrics".
Today's birds DO have both horizontal and vertical polarization, as well as spot-beams and circular polarization, for birds big enough to have the ability to station-keep and also to maintain a particular non-spinning/stabilized "view" of earth.
(Almost everything commercial or military. Small Amateur LEO birds often "tumble" continuously and the ground station has to have the ability to change polarization to match the tumble/spin rate.)
There's ZERO reason why each polarization must have a separate transmitter.
All that's required is proper switching of the RF path through appropriate phasing harnesses and to different ANTENNAS.
You're correct that the RF engineers designing BROADCAST FM made this determination that vertical polarization worked best for that application.
Point to point or any other reason, sometimes horizontal works better.
Honestly, most FM broadcasters today are using Circular Polarization. This way portable/mobile radio users don't experience 20dB "fades" when they toss the radio on a counter on its side.
So yes, your RF/microwave design instructor told you the anecdote about a specific application but it's just an anecdote. The RF engineers were way ahead of that, even back in the beginnings of broadcast.
Also, the modulation type doesn't matter. It could just as easily be AM up at VHF, or any other type of modulation you desire. Each has benefits and disadvantages.
(Don't think AM BROADCAST, which is in the hundreds to high 1000's of KHz frequency-wise...)
The modulation type is NOT tied to the frequency), or SSB or CW, or whatever... the RF polarization principals do not have any bearing on the modulation type used.
You choose each factor (antenna gain, polarization, radio modulation type, receiver sensitivity/selectivity, power output, etc.) to meet specific goals.
VHF and above can also be surprising... "E-Clouds" are a fairly regular occurrence in summertime (sun high overhead - high ionization of the atmosphere combined with space "weather" from the Sun), where low layers of the ionosphere become good reflectors of RF energy all the way up to VHF frequencies and higher, and long-haul communications for short periods can result.
I personally talked to Pensacola, FL from a hilltop near Limon, CO on 144.220 MHz utilizing SSB modulation both ways, last June during the ARRL June VHF contest. It was way cool to do something that's "impossible" most of the time, but possible during rare opportunities.
Same thing with the CW contact with the Oklahoma pan-handle on 222.1 MHz.
Antenna was a 13-element Yagi, power output was 400W of RF into the low-loss feedline, for probably 390-395W PEP out of the feedline into the antenna.
Similar, yes. They're saying that instead of a single polarization, or a circularly polarized signal, they're constantly turning the polarization... "spinning" it, at different rates which can then equal "intelligence".
An overly simplistic equivalent would be measuring the spin of an old record player optically and 33 RPM = a zero, and 78 RPM = 1. How fast can you switch the speed and copy a series of ones and zeros? Now how many different speeds can you detect with accuracy?
Look at things like phased aperture array radar antennas. The antennas get built into a structure, so they're not really even visible as individual antennas, when you start talking about ARRAYS of antennas... usually.
You could start by reading the ARRL Antenna Handbook which while "Amateur" radio based, is probably the broadest audience antenna design book out there. Presented in a very non-technical fashion where possible, and then the math is added in.
More people should read up on the distance-squared rule and learn that double the power on RF is only 3dB of gain... then go re-read how far away and how little power the deep space probes used (albeit with relatively high-gain antennas pointed directly at Earth) and how the Deep Space Network works.
When you start having to change the local environment and do cryogenic cooling of your entire receiving antenna system so you can raise the S/N ratio by lowering molecular noise in the receiver itself, because the signal you're trying to receive is THAT weak -- you know you really understand how RF and receivers work.
Some of the comments about "bandwidth" and "modulation" in this thread are amazingly wrong.
Agreed, in some respects. Linux has NEVER created anything better than a commercial company did first, the vast majority of apps are copy-cat applications. Sure, a little different eye candy, but nothing earth-shattering has ever come from the Linux desktop.
Got into another dumb discussion with a KDE fan the other day. Told him the KDE/GNOME thing continues to suck down developer time that could be better spent building something BETTER if both groups would only get some focus. But that'll never happen. He had his panties all in a bunch about the BUILD environment for GNOME being old.
Yeah, yeah... that's right kid, focus on the build environment and not the end product... makes sense to... no one who USES the software.
Linux is great for developers, and "customers" are always second-rate. Has always been that way, and always will. The only projects that do as well or better than commercial counterparts have real paying customers they have to answer to, or paid developers who's employers want results.
(Apache, the kernel, MySQL, whatever... name any GREAT Linux software, and it'll have real money and jobs behind it.)
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Some of your points are valid, but the corporate "not taking all in one machines seriously" is way off. My company's been buying a standard "class" of machine from Lenovo for each "type" of worker for years. Tech support has one laptop and one desktop option, Enginering has another set, Sales another, but all from the same manufacturer, and RARELY upgraded later on... just replaced after a few years when they start to die and cost too much money to keep on a service contract. It's not the "all in one" that companies don't take seriously, it's the fact that they're utterly and hopelessly stuck (maybe by choice) on Windows servers and Outlook/Exchange. It works for them. I just use the laptop they provide for work stuff, and have all Macs at home, complete with VMs for Windows or whatever I feel like... I see the corporation's machines as dated, incapable of running "everything", and slow... and usually with a whole lot less screen real-estate for the same price as I buy at home... even buying Macs. Want me to run Outlook? Sure boss... stick it here in my VM on this real machine that has a command line and a shell, and can run any OS out there! (Of course, they're not interested in that either... way too much loss of security policy and control... for corporate tastes.) A few friends work for progressive enough and small enough shops that when they asked to use their Macs, that was the answer... "as long as you can run Outlook in a VM for scheduling/whatever". Fine...
A half-joking prediction -- what do you bet Apple buys someone like Drobo or just builds their own prior to Snow Leopard's release, just to try to gather in the "I hate that there's no slots in this thing" crowd? Or perhaps a dual or quad drive Time Capsule? They often pay attention when the dumb-beat of whining gets high enough, but they rarely do it the way you think they're going to...
His point is, they're a business -- not basement hackers. Put together a hackintosh in your basement all of your own volition, and who's going to know or care? Certainly not Apple. Publish how to do it, or attempt to sell a product based on their work -- plan on being sued off the planet. Nothing "evil" about it, unless you're bought into the RMS kook-aid... yeah, I said kook. I'll get modded "Flamebait" for it, but I don't see anything "evil" in Apple tightly controlling THEIR product. Anyone wants to make something better, the open-sores community has been promising that for a couple of decades now... and continually under-delivering.
Let's see, the 20" iMac is on the coffee table in the living room... I'll just run right out and get a tower and stuff it under... oh, yeah... that won't fit there.
A single power cord with one of those rubber "speed bump" protectors over it out from under the couch, up the corner of the coffee table, and the Apple wireless keyboard and mouse... and it just sits there, looks good, and works as something not hideous to look at.
Works for us...
Give it a couple of years, and it'll be mid-range, if you buy it now. LOL!
You didn't mention what the problem was. (just curious).
Actually, they're quite clear on their investor conference calls that they're about growth and profit.
"Market share" is horse-crap marketing speak for "we sold a lot of stuff, but we didn't make any money doing it". It doesn't always mean that you're profitable in your business ventures.
Google it dummy. That took a whole whopping two seconds... and I don't even care.
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/02/11/tuaw-review-logitech-harmony-remote-and-the-mac/
There you go... sheesh.
Um, actually -- that's correct. The average computer user is completely baffled when presented with the myriad of options available on PC's these days, and has to go FIND a professional friend or relative to ask, "What the hell is really important?" You know this to be true, if you have any non-technical friends... they've asked you.
I'm generally a computing (not Mac, not WinTel, not Linux) fan-boy, and enjoy them all... but you have to hand it to Apple... they do know how to SIMPLIFY the purchasing and decision-making process for things that just don't matter to most folks.
They've also recently added simply "Back to my Drive" type functionality for their Time Capsule... how many people who are NON-technical can you think of would just love to be able to fire up their laptop and get files off their personal 1TB hard disk at home, WITHOUT thinking about it. Pay someone $100 a year to take care of that crap (we techies all know there's free and almost free ways to do it that are probably "better" to us, but seriously ... $100 a year is nothing if you DON'T know how), and get on with life. Do things important to you and IGNORE the computer...
THAT is the experience Apple strives for... computing that doesn't feel like computing and doesn't present the end-user with too many unnecessary or marginal options that in the end, us techies argue incessantly online about the virtues of, even as the technology is being replaced with the next "thing".
I agree to a point, but I was out of work for a year in 2001, and after about six months, it's really a waste of time...
You do need someone to drive a company to make a desktop that looks and works right... Linux might get it right someday. Keep trying. ;-)
Ditto. RT works great.
Obviously the whole thing's not going to end well. End it like a friend of mine did when a company royally screwed him over. Walk back to your desk, strip to your skin, and walk out... naked. Everyone in the industry to this day knows EXACTLY why he left, and no matter what the company officially says, his action and the reasons for it were never forgotten by anyone, ten years later.
Outlook = E-mail and calendar, something iPhone does just fine.
Word = What are you doing editing documents on a phone? If you just need to read them, who cares?
Excel = Maybe the only thing you might complain about on an iPhone, but who the hell does real business spreadsheets on a phone...?
Reality is... you're just as bought into the Windows mobile hype as some people are bought into the iPhone hype. No one uses a phone to do real work on things... it's just a viewport into existing documents and a way to keep in touch with e-mail.
Yeah, it's really not too bad.
Not to mention commercial broadcast is still alive and kicking, and as interconnected to both nationally syndicated content and local content, all in the same spectrum. The onset of Sirius/XM helped them figure out how to drastically cut costs (fat) and also to figure out time to work out their advertising contracts so they could also stream to the Net... so now they have "continuity" both in having a mix of local/national content, but also in that you can transition from a traditional AM/FM receiver to say, and iPhone with only a little synchronization/buffering change-over time... get out of the car, stream it from the phone... go in the house, turn back on the receiver in there, or keep listening on the phone. Same content, local hosts and personalities involved in the local community. Whether music stations that are involved in supporting local artists, or talk radio with local discussion -- they figured out how they'll make their "comeback" against Satellite-based services, which no one needs unless they're WAY out in the boonies. Now they start converting to digital, and use sub-carriers for more "focused" content that not all listeners can hear at first... they're golden until broadband is truly "everywhere" via cellular. In fact, they have the infrastructure to use their sub-carrier digital stuff as the wide-area TRANSPORT mechanism for the cellular carriers for things like streaming content where everyone's viewing/listening to the same streams...
Duh.
A percentage share of the profits or the cost-savings, and public acknowledgment that they did something good for the company.
The same thing the execs want for starting/running the company.
Not really all that hard to figure out (or to do), but most companies lose sight of it beyond about 300 staff members, and start using "incentives" that create negative real results, but make the hoardes of middle managers feel better that they have something to measure with "metrics".
Until they hit something and bounce off. Then all bets are off. There's a lot of "stuff" to hit out there in the real world that's RF-reflective.
Today's birds DO have both horizontal and vertical polarization, as well as spot-beams and circular polarization, for birds big enough to have the ability to station-keep and also to maintain a particular non-spinning/stabilized "view" of earth.
(Almost everything commercial or military. Small Amateur LEO birds often "tumble" continuously and the ground station has to have the ability to change polarization to match the tumble/spin rate.)
There's ZERO reason why each polarization must have a separate transmitter.
All that's required is proper switching of the RF path through appropriate phasing harnesses and to different ANTENNAS.
Nate
You're correct that the RF engineers designing BROADCAST FM made this determination that vertical polarization worked best for that application.
Point to point or any other reason, sometimes horizontal works better.
Honestly, most FM broadcasters today are using Circular Polarization. This way portable/mobile radio users don't experience 20dB "fades" when they toss the radio on a counter on its side.
So yes, your RF/microwave design instructor told you the anecdote about a specific application but it's just an anecdote. The RF engineers were way ahead of that, even back in the beginnings of broadcast.
Also, the modulation type doesn't matter. It could just as easily be AM up at VHF, or any other type of modulation you desire. Each has benefits and disadvantages.
(Don't think AM BROADCAST, which is in the hundreds to high 1000's of KHz frequency-wise...)
The modulation type is NOT tied to the frequency), or SSB or CW, or whatever... the RF polarization principals do not have any bearing on the modulation type used.
You choose each factor (antenna gain, polarization, radio modulation type, receiver sensitivity/selectivity, power output, etc.) to meet specific goals.
VHF and above can also be surprising... "E-Clouds" are a fairly regular occurrence in summertime (sun high overhead - high ionization of the atmosphere combined with space "weather" from the Sun), where low layers of the ionosphere become good reflectors of RF energy all the way up to VHF frequencies and higher, and long-haul communications for short periods can result.
I personally talked to Pensacola, FL from a hilltop near Limon, CO on 144.220 MHz utilizing SSB modulation both ways, last June during the ARRL June VHF contest. It was way cool to do something that's "impossible" most of the time, but possible during rare opportunities.
Same thing with the CW contact with the Oklahoma pan-handle on 222.1 MHz.
Antenna was a 13-element Yagi, power output was 400W of RF into the low-loss feedline, for probably 390-395W PEP out of the feedline into the antenna.
Nate
Similar, yes. They're saying that instead of a single polarization, or a circularly polarized signal, they're constantly turning the polarization ... "spinning" it, at different rates which can then equal "intelligence".
An overly simplistic equivalent would be measuring the spin of an old record player optically and 33 RPM = a zero, and 78 RPM = 1. How fast can you switch the speed and copy a series of ones and zeros? Now how many different speeds can you detect with accuracy?
Nate
Look at things like phased aperture array radar antennas. The antennas get built into a structure, so they're not really even visible as individual antennas, when you start talking about ARRAYS of antennas... usually.
You could start by reading the ARRL Antenna Handbook which while "Amateur" radio based, is probably the broadest audience antenna design book out there. Presented in a very non-technical fashion where possible, and then the math is added in.
More people should read up on the distance-squared rule and learn that double the power on RF is only 3dB of gain... then go re-read how far away and how little power the deep space probes used (albeit with relatively high-gain antennas pointed directly at Earth) and how the Deep Space Network works.
When you start having to change the local environment and do cryogenic cooling of your entire receiving antenna system so you can raise the S/N ratio by lowering molecular noise in the receiver itself, because the signal you're trying to receive is THAT weak -- you know you really understand how RF and receivers work.
Some of the comments about "bandwidth" and "modulation" in this thread are amazingly wrong.
Agreed, in some respects. Linux has NEVER created anything better than a commercial company did first, the vast majority of apps are copy-cat applications. Sure, a little different eye candy, but nothing earth-shattering has ever come from the Linux desktop.
Got into another dumb discussion with a KDE fan the other day. Told him the KDE/GNOME thing continues to suck down developer time that could be better spent building something BETTER if both groups would only get some focus. But that'll never happen. He had his panties all in a bunch about the BUILD environment for GNOME being old.
Yeah, yeah... that's right kid, focus on the build environment and not the end product... makes sense to ... no one who USES the software.
Linux is great for developers, and "customers" are always second-rate. Has always been that way, and always will. The only projects that do as well or better than commercial counterparts have real paying customers they have to answer to, or paid developers who's employers want results.
(Apache, the kernel, MySQL, whatever... name any GREAT Linux software, and it'll have real money and jobs behind it.)