The FF weren't motivated by "freedom", whatever meaning that word has for you, but by "independence", or more to the point, "tax evasion". They didn't want to pay the high (at the time) taxes. After that, things just escalated out of control on both sides of the pond. The whole thing was kind of silly really. We should have found a way to resolve our differences more peacefully.
Well, for one thing, your girls are too pretty to be North American. And yet they are...
And don't forget the whole Frenglish thing, with people starting sentences in French and finishing them in English. Just sends shivers down your spine and makes all the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
I think you mean 14 1/2". Or sometimes 22 1/2". Not many carpenters on slashdot I guess. Also, you will need more than a pen knife to get through the 7/16" OSB sheathing that is so often used these days. On older houses you might even have 3/4" tongue and groove boards to get through instead of plywood or OSB.
Yes, they are designed to pick locks. Any pin tumbler locks. They should outlaw paper clips too. They are tools of the devil. Thank the lord that we have the government to protect us from our tools.
Well I for one very much appreciate tax breaks for the poor. When are we going to get a candidate who runs on the platform of eliminating completely all income taxes on anyone who makes less than $40,000 year, while somewhat raising taxes on anyone who makes between 40K and 100K and signifantly raising taxes on anyone who dares to make more than 100K/year.
Also, lets repeal that stupid gas tax. That's about as regressive as they come and our highways and byways are just fine the way they are.
I wasn't too thrilled with Snow Crash. I did read it though. For me Cryptonomicon was his great work. I have read that book so many times and was breathlessly awaiting the "prequel", Quicksilver. What a letdown. It didn't have any of the spirit of the original. None of the humour or the witty, clever conversations. I found it to have no redeeming features. I was shocked. I haven't bothered to even skim his latest one.
What annoys me far more than any long windedness is the characters themselves. Particularly that female, beautiful, intelligent, clever, wise, and otherwise completely perfect human creature that became some kind of main character by the name of Eliza. Grrrr. Sounds to me like his wife was doing the writing or something. Soon after "meeting" her I longed to see her die a grisly death.
I had liked all of his previous female characters, but Eliza was a totally one dimensional PerfectFemale. Yawn. She was also totally portrayed like a modern American Woman which is very very far from the reality at the time. Actually some of his other female characters in the book don't fare much better. Eighteenth century my arse! I wouldn't be surprised if they were all just carbon copies of his wife's basic personality.
I predict that they are going to finally get a clue and start prosecuting the ISP subscriber of every IP address caught uploading/downloading copyrighted material. This will become their new business model. They will find a way to keep their legal costs down and maximize the maximum out of court settlement.
At some point in the next decade we will see the RIAA/MPAA become an almost completely lawsuit driven organization. They may even stop releasing content on CD/DVD entirely and do the internet releases themselves. Like a fisherman baiting his hook...
After all, how many people are really going to download 3000 songs or buy $3000 worth of CDs? Not many. And $3000 is only the beginning. Once they refine their new business model and start handpicking rich families for special prosecution, they could see settlements in the $100,000 range that actually get paid.
But who are you going to download from that has 2-5 Mbps of upload bandwidth? Don't forget that the RIAA/MPAA are going after the uploaders not the downloaders, and they are not doing that because they are stupid. They realize that without uploaders no one will be downloading anything.
Until ISPs start selling UL bandwidth as aggressively as they sell DL bandwidth you will never see anywhere near those speeds on P2P networks. Many ISPs actively discourage or even forbid P2P activity. Highly asymmetric connections are a nice way of keeping p2p bandwidth down. People don't think about what they can upload but only what they can download. Most people would rather have 10Mbit/90kbit connection than a 1.5 Mbit/1.5Mbit connection even though the latter would result in much faster downloads for everyone. It's actually quite a clever system. So I don't see actual p2p download speeds increasing significantly any time soon.
What, we already have service in the 20-30mbit range....in Japan. Outside of Tokyo or Seoul I don't know of many places with that kind of bandwidth. My friend still uses 56k and I use a 1.5 Mbit cable modem. Back in 2000 I had a 7.1 Mbit ADSL line. Also, remember that for p2p content distribution the UL bandwidth is more important than the DL bandwidth. UL bandwidth hasn't progressed much at all.
The fact is that changes in broadband bandwidth are far more dependant on economics than on technology. If the large monopolistic communication corps don't think faster speeds for p2p will increase their bottom line, it just won't happen. In fact many ISPs are intentionally blocking all p2p ports that they can find. So I'm not so sure things are progressing the way you think they are, but it is nice to be young... Warp drive is only a few years away.
You can fill out a job application if you can read.
Just because you can fill out a job application doesn't mean you will get the job. I don't care who you are or how much experience or qualifications you have, there is always someone better (judged by HR or the hiring manager) out there.
You do realize that your post is full of (nearly Hollywood level) stereotypes. And I hate people who think finding a job is as easy as falling of a log. It may be true for you. That may be your reality, but it is not true for everyone.
Many of the places where I applied for work had lines of applicants at those stupid computers they have now. It seems like every time I walk into Target for instance there is at least one person applying for one of those hellish low paying jobs. Why don't you just face the fact that there are nearly always way more people than there are jobs? Life is like a game of musical chairs and if you are left standing when the music ends and there is no government safety net, you may quite literally starve to death through no fault of your own.
BTW, where can I find this "free" education you are talking about? I would love to go back to school, but I don't think I will ever be able to afford it. At least not on the $5/hour (after taxes) that most people in this country are lucky to earn. Also, drug dealing is a real job and a hard one at that. Until I recently found a job, I was (quite seriously) considering that as a career move.
The fact that some people will do anything they can to abuse any system doesn't mean that we should have no system at all. Although I recently managed to find a job at a fast food restaurant (it looks like my software and engineering days are over), I came very, very close to having no money for food at all.
I applied to literally hundreds of jobs at supermarkets, restaurants, department stores, anywhere and everywhere I could think of. I could not find any job at all.
I am single and without children so I do not qualify for welfare in the USA no matter what. I would have qualified for $140/month worth of food stamps for a whopping 90 days, after which if I still had not found a job I would have either had to steal, find some edible plants in the woods (or trap animals), or starved to death like any other animal that doesn't have food.
I am a Libertarian myself, and I thought much like many of you when I was younger. Taxes have not been reduced, but our "safety net" sure has. If you don't have children there is no welfare, or even "workfare" for that matter. Food stamps ($35/week max) are time limited to 90 days. It may seem difficult for some of you fellow Libertarians to believe, but the US government is quite willing to allow a relatively able citizen to starve to death even if he wants to work and is willing to do so for almost nothing.
I don't necessarily have a problem with this. I did not think that I was going to survive this winter. I was just about to read some books on edible plant identification and animal trapping. I had already read about the details of death by starvation so I knew what to expect.
Just be sheer luck (only a few days ago) I finally managed to land a job at a fast food joint. So now it looks like I don't need food stamps after all. Things could just as easily have gone the other way and none of you would ever have known about it. Ignorance is bliss I guess. Some of you really need a reality check. For better or for worse, THERE IS NO SAFETY NET in the US anymore. If you don't believe me research it yourself.
I don't like paying taxes any more than anyone else, but if there is one government program that should absolutely be the last to go as our government dissolves (yeah right!), and our libertarian or anarcho-libertarian utopia begins, it is our sensibly limited food stamp program. It can, and it does save people's lives whether you happen to know these people or not.
Closing your eyes just makes you blind. There is a great big world out there. All you have to do is look. It's too bad that people just ignore what they don't want to see.
But does it allow ActiveX whitelisting? ActiveX is a very dangerous weapon to allow any (possibly hostile) website to use against you.
I admit that I use IE with everything shut down except for my whitelisted "trusted sites". So very few sites are allowed to use ActiveX or JavaScript.
I do prefer both firefox and opera (but not mozilla) in every other way, but whitelisting for active scripting (of any flavour) is too important a feature for me to do without.
Based on the free space loss equation (where signal loss is proportional to frequency), and based on e=k*f where energy(e)in a EM wave is proportional to the frequency(f), I must say that you seem to be correct.
My belief to the contrary came from a number of sources I deemed reliable, but it seems that the idea that higher frequencies take less energy to propogate a given distance is just a myth. So I guess there is absolutely no reason (aside from antenna size and bandwidth) to transmit at higher frequencies. There seems to be no real benefit at all.
Nice link. Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) "hops" (jumps around to different frequencies). Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum does not. Direct Sequence is used more often on cordless phones. It is true that wideband is technically different, but Spread Spectrum could be seen as a form of wideband transmission since the whole point is to spread the signal over a wide range of frequencies to reduce detection.
Here's a quote from that article: The use of these special pseudo noise codes in spread spectrum (SS) communications makes signals appear wide band and noise-like.
Are you sure that Verizon uses 850 Mhz? Verizon wireless is a CDMA company. I have never heard of 850 Mhz CDMA, although I have heard of 850 Mhz GSM. I have heard of 800 Mhz CDMA, but I was not aware of anyone was actually using it in the US. I thought everyone was using 1900 (PCS channel). If you are right, then that is indeed an advantage when using the cellphone indoors or in the city.
AT&T was using an 800-something Mhz TDMA system until they recently switched to GSM (which technically is a form of TDMA). I had thought they were the only ones in the US with digital 800 Mhz cell phones.
You are almost right. Low frequencies only travel farther (transmissions are attenuated less) when there are obstacles involved. Higher frequencies are better for line-of-sight transmission. Since most people (at least the ones who buy cordless phones) don't live outside on flat open land, microwave transmitters are less efficient for cordless phone applications. The use of 5.8 Ghz for cordless phones only makes sense if you live in a studio (one room) apartment.
Yet another reason why 900 Mhz is the best frequency so far allocated to cordless phones. It is high enough to allow reasonably short antennas and open space propogation efficiency, and low enough to still penetrate multiple walls at reasonable power levels.
My 900 Mhz handset seems to use a reasonably efficient 3" (~8cm) 1/4 wave antenna, while my base uses a nice 6" 1/2 wave antenna. Of course 2400 Mhz allows antennas that don't protrude out of even a small handset. In some applications, like very small handsets, this could be a significant design advantage, especially outside in rural areas where building penetration is least important and open space range most important).
For the old 46/49 Mhz phones the only privacy feature that I can recall is "frequency inversion" which produced Donald Duck quacking noises instead of speech. Some Uniden phones used this. However, such speech could still be monitored with the use of commonly available frequency inversion decoders. There were better "rolling" frequency scramblers for which decoders were not so easily available, but Uniden was not using those.
Keep in mind that the 46/49 Mhz phones were so low in power in comparison to modern phones that an eavesdropper needed to be much closer and/or have a much more sensitive receiver to pick up the broadcast. When 900 Mhz phones first came out they were regarded as less private until the first digital and then digital spread spectrum models were released. I am not aware of any viable method to eavesdrop on DSS calls.
From the article: If such logic stands, one would assume that a cordless phone utilizing the 900 MHz band would perform better than one using the 2.4 GHz (or 2400 MHz) band. Not so.
Unfortunately this is so. This article is misleading. 900 Mhz SS is superior technology to 2400 Mhz SS for the typical cordless phone usage pattern. 900 Mhz will be attenuated far less traveling through walls than 2400 Mhz. In open space 2400 Mhz will give better range, but for communicating through structures, 900 Mhz is more efficient. 2400 Mhz was a step backwards. Any real life testing will demonstrate this.
The same reasoning they apply (about filling a room with more RF waves) applies to 5.8 Ghz as well. So by that reasoning a 5.8 Ghz phone should be superior. They clearly have lots of 2.4 Ghz phones (the current standard) to sell but no 900 Mhz phones. So of course 2400 is the ideal frequency.
Their point about antennas is valid though. Higher frequencies allow for more efficient recievers with the ultra-short antennas that are typically used nowadays.
Good post. I was going to mod you up, but I'd like to make a minor correction instead. As many have stated, the "penetration ability" of RF waves is inversely proportional to frequency (proportional to wavelength). For getting through building structures the best are 46/49 Mhz phones followed by 900, 2.4, and 5.8. What no one has (yet) mentioned is that higher frequencies do give better range for unobstructed line-of-sight transmission. Higher frequencies require less power (especially important for handsets) to propogate through empty space. The problem lies with obstructions like walls.
Anyone who has tried to use a handheld GPS while hiking in dense forest has seen that even 1227 or 1575 Mhz is a high enough frequency to have difficulty penetrating the leaves on trees (at least at such low power).
So as long as you can actually see your base a 5.8 Ghz cordless phone (RF transmitter) will give you the greatest range, but in any situation with obstructions it will give you the least range per unit of output power.
46 Mhz is such a low frequency that it penetrates walls easily without losing much power, but it is less efficient at open-space propogation (per watt). 900 Mhz seems to be a nearly perfect balance (perhaps 450 Mhz might be better). The frequency is high enough that open space propagation is very efficient, but still low enough that it will penetrate walls with some effectiveness.
Spread spectrum is not a form of "frequency hopping" in most cordless phones. It is a form of "wideband" transmission. It does not actually "hop" per se (although there are exceptions). It does allow for greater power and range. The longest range cordless phones for most people who live indoors in a multi-room house is a 900 Mhz spread spectrum phone.
I bought as many of these as I could because I knew that MarketSpeak would win over RF theory and that truly long range cordless phones would probably become unavailable.
True AI is always 10 years away. The hard truth is that it will more than likely be 100 years or more. Even the youngest slashdotters will not live to see it.
AI will likely only move forward along with advances in robotics and bio-connectionist systems. Traditional programming doesn't lend itself well to the task.
"Expert systems" is an unfortunate term. I prefer "knowledge based", but even those programs have proven impractical. The most ambitious attempt has been Doug Lenat's CYC project.
Faster processors certainly won't hurt AI, but the answers do not lie there. Of that much we can be sure. As with space travel, we are all waiting for some kind of fundamental breakthrough.
Maybe it will be some combination of robotics, human and experiential trained (maybe wetware) connectionism, along with some CYC-like rules.
In a recent article, anandtech reported that Shuttle is planning to release a SFF desktop platform for the Pentium M by the end of the year. A 1.1 Ghz ULV Pentium-M is supposed to dissipate a scaldingly hot 5 watts. Even at 2 Ghz it is only supposed to dissipate 21 watts.
Considering my 1.13 Ghz PIII-S dissipates 29.9 watts, I'm pretty impressed. I could keep my current clock speed and only use 5 watts. That Shuttle is going to be my next upgrade. Hopefully the Pentium M chips will have dropped somewhat in price by then as well.
Samsung drives are in fact quieter than Seagate ones. Especially if you compare large capacity drives and not the older Seagate ones with the Seashield. The seeks on the Samsung are much quieter. The idle noise on the newer Seagate drives is quite noticeable. Aside from Samsung Seagate is definitely the quietest though, with Hitachi a distant second. WD and Maxtor sound like turboprops revving up for takeoff.
Well there were the RCA SelectaVision videodiscs. Those things were like playing a movie on a vinyl LP. I don't recall laserdiscs ever having cartridges either.
21" monitors are pretty cheap these days. They can easily display 1080i (1920x1080) resolution. They can typically display up to 2048x1536. They will also have much better dot pitch and color resolution than an HDTV.
It should be easy to tell the difference between a normal 720x480 (NTSC) DVD and a 1920x1080 HD-DVD.
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The FF weren't motivated by "freedom", whatever meaning that word has for you, but by "independence", or more to the point, "tax evasion". They didn't want to pay the high (at the time) taxes. After that, things just escalated out of control on both sides of the pond. The whole thing was kind of silly really. We should have found a way to resolve our differences more peacefully.
Well, for one thing, your girls are too pretty to be North American. And yet they are...
And don't forget the whole Frenglish thing, with people starting sentences in French and finishing them in English. Just sends shivers down your spine and makes all the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
I think you mean 14 1/2". Or sometimes 22 1/2". Not many carpenters on slashdot I guess. Also, you will need more than a pen knife to get through the 7/16" OSB sheathing that is so often used these days. On older houses you might even have 3/4" tongue and groove boards to get through instead of plywood or OSB.
Yes, they are designed to pick locks. Any pin tumbler locks. They should outlaw paper clips too. They are tools of the devil. Thank the lord that we have the government to protect us from our tools.
Well I for one very much appreciate tax breaks for the poor. When are we going to get a candidate who runs on the platform of eliminating completely all income taxes on anyone who makes less than $40,000 year, while somewhat raising taxes on anyone who makes between 40K and 100K and signifantly raising taxes on anyone who dares to make more than 100K/year.
Also, lets repeal that stupid gas tax. That's about as regressive as they come and our highways and byways are just fine the way they are.
I wasn't too thrilled with Snow Crash. I did read it though. For me Cryptonomicon was his great work. I have read that book so many times and was breathlessly awaiting the "prequel", Quicksilver. What a letdown. It didn't have any of the spirit of the original. None of the humour or the witty, clever conversations. I found it to have no redeeming features. I was shocked. I haven't bothered to even skim his latest one.
What annoys me far more than any long windedness is the characters themselves. Particularly that female, beautiful, intelligent, clever, wise, and otherwise completely perfect human creature that became some kind of main character by the name of Eliza. Grrrr. Sounds to me like his wife was doing the writing or something. Soon after "meeting" her I longed to see her die a grisly death.
I had liked all of his previous female characters, but Eliza was a totally one dimensional PerfectFemale. Yawn. She was also totally portrayed like a modern American Woman which is very very far from the reality at the time. Actually some of his other female characters in the book don't fare much better. Eighteenth century my arse! I wouldn't be surprised if they were all just carbon copies of his wife's basic personality.
I predict that they are going to finally get a clue and start prosecuting the ISP subscriber of every IP address caught uploading/downloading copyrighted material. This will become their new business model. They will find a way to keep their legal costs down and maximize the maximum out of court settlement.
At some point in the next decade we will see the RIAA/MPAA become an almost completely lawsuit driven organization. They may even stop releasing content on CD/DVD entirely and do the internet releases themselves. Like a fisherman baiting his hook...
After all, how many people are really going to download 3000 songs or buy $3000 worth of CDs? Not many. And $3000 is only the beginning. Once they refine their new business model and start handpicking rich families for special prosecution, they could see settlements in the $100,000 range that actually get paid.
But who are you going to download from that has 2-5 Mbps of upload bandwidth? Don't forget that the RIAA/MPAA are going after the uploaders not the downloaders, and they are not doing that because they are stupid. They realize that without uploaders no one will be downloading anything.
Until ISPs start selling UL bandwidth as aggressively as they sell DL bandwidth you will never see anywhere near those speeds on P2P networks. Many ISPs actively discourage or even forbid P2P activity. Highly asymmetric connections are a nice way of keeping p2p bandwidth down. People don't think about what they can upload but only what they can download. Most people would rather have 10Mbit/90kbit connection than a 1.5 Mbit/1.5Mbit connection even though the latter would result in much faster downloads for everyone. It's actually quite a clever system. So I don't see actual p2p download speeds increasing significantly any time soon.
What, we already have service in the 20-30mbit range. ...in Japan. Outside of Tokyo or Seoul I don't know of many places with that kind of bandwidth. My friend still uses 56k and I use a 1.5 Mbit cable modem. Back in 2000 I had a 7.1 Mbit ADSL line. Also, remember that for p2p content distribution the UL bandwidth is more important than the DL bandwidth. UL bandwidth hasn't progressed much at all.
The fact is that changes in broadband bandwidth are far more dependant on economics than on technology. If the large monopolistic communication corps don't think faster speeds for p2p will increase their bottom line, it just won't happen. In fact many ISPs are intentionally blocking all p2p ports that they can find. So I'm not so sure things are progressing the way you think they are, but it is nice to be young... Warp drive is only a few years away.
You can fill out a job application if you can read.
Just because you can fill out a job application doesn't mean you will get the job. I don't care who you are or how much experience or qualifications you have, there is always someone better (judged by HR or the hiring manager) out there.
You do realize that your post is full of (nearly Hollywood level) stereotypes. And I hate people who think finding a job is as easy as falling of a log. It may be true for you. That may be your reality, but it is not true for everyone.
Many of the places where I applied for work had lines of applicants at those stupid computers they have now. It seems like every time I walk into Target for instance there is at least one person applying for one of those hellish low paying jobs. Why don't you just face the fact that there are nearly always way more people than there are jobs? Life is like a game of musical chairs and if you are left standing when the music ends and there is no government safety net, you may quite literally starve to death through no fault of your own.
BTW, where can I find this "free" education you are talking about? I would love to go back to school, but I don't think I will ever be able to afford it. At least not on the $5/hour (after taxes) that most people in this country are lucky to earn. Also, drug dealing is a real job and a hard one at that. Until I recently found a job, I was (quite seriously) considering that as a career move.
The fact that some people will do anything they can to abuse any system doesn't mean that we should have no system at all. Although I recently managed to find a job at a fast food restaurant (it looks like my software and engineering days are over), I came very, very close to having no money for food at all.
I applied to literally hundreds of jobs at supermarkets, restaurants, department stores, anywhere and everywhere I could think of. I could not find any job at all.
I am single and without children so I do not qualify for welfare in the USA no matter what. I would have qualified for $140/month worth of food stamps for a whopping 90 days, after which if I still had not found a job I would have either had to steal, find some edible plants in the woods (or trap animals), or starved to death like any other animal that doesn't have food.
I am a Libertarian myself, and I thought much like many of you when I was younger. Taxes have not been reduced, but our "safety net" sure has. If you don't have children there is no welfare, or even "workfare" for that matter. Food stamps ($35/week max) are time limited to 90 days. It may seem difficult for some of you fellow Libertarians to believe, but the US government is quite willing to allow a relatively able citizen to starve to death even if he wants to work and is willing to do so for almost nothing.
I don't necessarily have a problem with this. I did not think that I was going to survive this winter. I was just about to read some books on edible plant identification and animal trapping. I had already read about the details of death by starvation so I knew what to expect.
Just be sheer luck (only a few days ago) I finally managed to land a job at a fast food joint. So now it looks like I don't need food stamps after all. Things could just as easily have gone the other way and none of you would ever have known about it. Ignorance is bliss I guess. Some of you really need a reality check. For better or for worse, THERE IS NO SAFETY NET in the US anymore. If you don't believe me research it yourself.
I don't like paying taxes any more than anyone else, but if there is one government program that should absolutely be the last to go as our government dissolves (yeah right!), and our libertarian or anarcho-libertarian utopia begins, it is our sensibly limited food stamp program. It can, and it does save people's lives whether you happen to know these people or not.
Closing your eyes just makes you blind. There is a great big world out there. All you have to do is look. It's too bad that people just ignore what they don't want to see.
Actually XP Lite is a different product, although that would have been a good name. Or maybe XP Trial or XP-SX.
But does it allow ActiveX whitelisting? ActiveX is a very dangerous weapon to allow any (possibly hostile) website to use against you.
I admit that I use IE with everything shut down except for my whitelisted "trusted sites". So very few sites are allowed to use ActiveX or JavaScript.
I do prefer both firefox and opera (but not mozilla) in every other way, but whitelisting for active scripting (of any flavour) is too important a feature for me to do without.
Based on the free space loss equation (where signal loss is proportional to frequency), and based on e=k*f where energy(e)in a EM wave is proportional to the frequency(f), I must say that you seem to be correct.
My belief to the contrary came from a number of sources I deemed reliable, but it seems that the idea that higher frequencies take less energy to propogate a given distance is just a myth. So I guess there is absolutely no reason (aside from antenna size and bandwidth) to transmit at higher frequencies. There seems to be no real benefit at all.
Nice link. Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) "hops" (jumps around to different frequencies). Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum does not. Direct Sequence is used more often on cordless phones. It is true that wideband is technically different, but Spread Spectrum could be seen as a form of wideband transmission since the whole point is to spread the signal over a wide range of frequencies to reduce detection.
Here's a quote from that article:
The use of these special pseudo noise codes in spread spectrum (SS) communications makes signals appear wide band and noise-like.
Are you sure that Verizon uses 850 Mhz? Verizon wireless is a CDMA company. I have never heard of 850 Mhz CDMA, although I have heard of 850 Mhz GSM. I have heard of 800 Mhz CDMA, but I was not aware of anyone was actually using it in the US. I thought everyone was using 1900 (PCS channel). If you are right, then that is indeed an advantage when using the cellphone indoors or in the city.
AT&T was using an 800-something Mhz TDMA system until they recently switched to GSM (which technically is a form of TDMA). I had thought they were the only ones in the US with digital 800 Mhz cell phones.
You are almost right. Low frequencies only travel farther (transmissions are attenuated less) when there are obstacles involved. Higher frequencies are better for line-of-sight transmission. Since most people (at least the ones who buy cordless phones) don't live outside on flat open land, microwave transmitters are less efficient for cordless phone applications. The use of 5.8 Ghz for cordless phones only makes sense if you live in a studio (one room) apartment.
Yet another reason why 900 Mhz is the best frequency so far allocated to cordless phones. It is high enough to allow reasonably short antennas and open space propogation efficiency, and low enough to still penetrate multiple walls at reasonable power levels.
My 900 Mhz handset seems to use a reasonably efficient 3" (~8cm) 1/4 wave antenna, while my base uses a nice 6" 1/2 wave antenna. Of course 2400 Mhz allows antennas that don't protrude out of even a small handset. In some applications, like very small handsets, this could be a significant design advantage, especially outside in rural areas where building penetration is least important and open space range most important).
For the old 46/49 Mhz phones the only privacy feature that I can recall is "frequency inversion" which produced Donald Duck quacking noises instead of speech. Some Uniden phones used this. However, such speech could still be monitored with the use of commonly available frequency inversion decoders. There were better "rolling" frequency scramblers for which decoders were not so easily available, but Uniden was not using those.
Keep in mind that the 46/49 Mhz phones were so low in power in comparison to modern phones that an eavesdropper needed to be much closer and/or have a much more sensitive receiver to pick up the broadcast. When 900 Mhz phones first came out they were regarded as less private until the first digital and then digital spread spectrum models were released. I am not aware of any viable method to eavesdrop on DSS calls.
From the article: If such logic stands, one would assume that a cordless phone utilizing the 900 MHz band would perform better than one using the 2.4 GHz (or 2400 MHz) band. Not so.
Unfortunately this is so. This article is misleading. 900 Mhz SS is superior technology to 2400 Mhz SS for the typical cordless phone usage pattern. 900 Mhz will be attenuated far less traveling through walls than 2400 Mhz. In open space 2400 Mhz will give better range, but for communicating through structures, 900 Mhz is more efficient. 2400 Mhz was a step backwards. Any real life testing will demonstrate this.
The same reasoning they apply (about filling a room with more RF waves) applies to 5.8 Ghz as well. So by that reasoning a 5.8 Ghz phone should be superior. They clearly have lots of 2.4 Ghz phones (the current standard) to sell but no 900 Mhz phones. So of course 2400 is the ideal frequency.
Their point about antennas is valid though. Higher frequencies allow for more efficient recievers with the ultra-short antennas that are typically used nowadays.
Good post. I was going to mod you up, but I'd like to make a minor correction instead. As many have stated, the "penetration ability" of RF waves is inversely proportional to frequency (proportional to wavelength). For getting through building structures the best are 46/49 Mhz phones followed by 900, 2.4, and 5.8. What no one has (yet) mentioned is that higher frequencies do give better range for unobstructed line-of-sight transmission. Higher frequencies require less power (especially important for handsets) to propogate through empty space. The problem lies with obstructions like walls.
Anyone who has tried to use a handheld GPS while hiking in dense forest has seen that even 1227 or 1575 Mhz is a high enough frequency to have difficulty penetrating the leaves on trees (at least at such low power).
So as long as you can actually see your base a 5.8 Ghz cordless phone (RF transmitter) will give you the greatest range, but in any situation with obstructions it will give you the least range per unit of output power.
46 Mhz is such a low frequency that it penetrates walls easily without losing much power, but it is less efficient at open-space propogation (per watt). 900 Mhz seems to be a nearly perfect balance (perhaps 450 Mhz might be better). The frequency is high enough that open space propagation is very efficient, but still low enough that it will penetrate walls with some effectiveness.
Spread spectrum is not a form of "frequency hopping" in most cordless phones. It is a form of "wideband" transmission. It does not actually "hop" per se (although there are exceptions). It does allow for greater power and range. The longest range cordless phones for most people who live indoors in a multi-room house is a 900 Mhz spread spectrum phone.
I bought as many of these as I could because I knew that MarketSpeak would win over RF theory and that truly long range cordless phones would probably become unavailable.
True AI is always 10 years away. The hard truth is that it will more than likely be 100 years or more. Even the youngest slashdotters will not live to see it.
AI will likely only move forward along with advances in robotics and bio-connectionist systems. Traditional programming doesn't lend itself well to the task.
"Expert systems" is an unfortunate term. I prefer "knowledge based", but even those programs have proven impractical. The most ambitious attempt has been Doug Lenat's CYC project.
Faster processors certainly won't hurt AI, but the answers do not lie there. Of that much we can be sure. As with space travel, we are all waiting for some kind of fundamental breakthrough.
Maybe it will be some combination of robotics, human and experiential trained (maybe wetware) connectionism, along with some CYC-like rules.
In a recent article, anandtech reported that Shuttle is planning to release a SFF desktop platform for the Pentium M by the end of the year. A 1.1 Ghz ULV Pentium-M is supposed to dissipate a scaldingly hot 5 watts. Even at 2 Ghz it is only supposed to dissipate 21 watts.
Considering my 1.13 Ghz PIII-S dissipates 29.9 watts, I'm pretty impressed. I could keep my current clock speed and only use 5 watts. That Shuttle is going to be my next upgrade. Hopefully the Pentium M chips will have dropped somewhat in price by then as well.
Samsung drives are in fact quieter than Seagate ones. Especially if you compare large capacity drives and not the older Seagate ones with the Seashield. The seeks on the Samsung are much quieter. The idle noise on the newer Seagate drives is quite noticeable. Aside from Samsung Seagate is definitely the quietest though, with Hitachi a distant second. WD and Maxtor sound like turboprops revving up for takeoff.
Well there were the RCA SelectaVision videodiscs. Those things were like playing a movie on a vinyl LP. I don't recall laserdiscs ever having cartridges either.
21" monitors are pretty cheap these days. They can easily display 1080i (1920x1080) resolution. They can typically display up to 2048x1536. They will also have much better dot pitch and color resolution than an HDTV.
It should be easy to tell the difference between a normal 720x480 (NTSC) DVD and a 1920x1080 HD-DVD.