The problem is that Usenet feeds were approaching DS-3 speeds last time I checked (over a year ago), and are probably beyond that now.
Satellite is the only reasonably way to get a newsfeed these days (without paying $5,000-$10,000 per month for bandwidth), but even the satellite providers are running out of room using QPSK modulation on a single Ku-band transponder. Higher-order modulation would require a larger then 1m dish (well, maybe until DVB-S2 is standardized).
I don't know about letters, but it costs a lot to ship freight to Guam. I work for a network that has shifted from sending video tapes of broadcast material to Guam to shipping DVDs. The reduction of freight costs paid for the DVD burners and players in one year. American Samoa as well...
I wrote that on stationary bike. Very tired. Sorry poor english. If I stop, generator go out, kernel panic. Lost 40 pounds this way, Slashdot makes my workout much shorter.
1) All free market transactions represent an increase in wealth for both parties, otherwise they wouldn't partake. The buyer thinks he is getting more than he paid, the seller thinks he is paid more than an item is worth to him
2) Redistributional taxes are wealth-neutral. $1 is still $1 regarless who spends it. Recent tax history shows no real GDP benefit or damage from tax cuts or increases of reasonable sizes.
2.5) Of course, if you nuts with tax rates, you can make everyone life a living hell and cause some GDP growth damage
3) On the other hand, periods of low inflation are orrelated with GDP growth, periods of high inflation correlated with GDP stagnation or decline
4) There is a 10-year boom/bust/boom business cycle in the US
5) Wealth destruction of taxes is when it is spent on things people don't value (how much is a B2 bomber worth to you?)
6) Spending is up at the Federal and Local levels. Some of it is probably going to waste...
7) Social Security and Medicare will go into deficit over the next 20 years, and massive changes will have to occur. Hold on!
8) US Farmers receive massive amounts of Federal subsidy, enough to cram out imports from many countries. EU farmers get even more.
9) The world is becoming more democratic and free-market, slowly. Growth is way up in formerly protectionist socialist India and formerly communist China.
10) It tok 50 years for South Korea to go from a dirt-poor country to an economy that rivals some European ones. Growth and poverty reduction take time.
The gain of a horn antenna is dependent on the size of the final aperature in wavelengths.
OK, I think I was overestimating a bit. It looks like for 2.4 GHz, a pyramidal horn with a 30cm x 30cm opening is about 14 dBi. That's probably going to be your typical "cardboard box" horn size.
It would take a pyramidal horn with an opening of 1m x 1m to be 25 dBi for 802.11b. That certainly is not impossible to build (use wood, not cardboard), but a lot easier than building the equivalent parabolic dish. It is all "straight lines."
Now for 802.11a (5 GHz), you can get a 25 dBi pyramidal horn with an aperature of only 50cm x 50cm...
Heh, I was a part of a space failure myself. We were using pretty much off-the-shelf equipment, but it passed NASA spec shake and thermal testing. What probably did it in was radiation...in low earth orbit we figured there wouldn't be much risk of radiation problems.
If we were to do it again, we probably would have had some kind of radiation-resistant reset system, because building the whole thing in rad-hard would be very expensive (our budget was $1500 plus donated equipment!) But having a few rad-hard devices to reset the box in case of a crash would probably have been affordable.
About 100 amateur radio operators contacted our payload, and relayed their GPS coordinates to others using amateur packet radio. At the same time, the GPS unit on board the Spartan satellite transmitted its position to listeners on the ground as well. But had it not crashed after about 17 hours, it is possible that several hundred other amateur radio operators would have used it.
My suggestion is to read what a real economist says about trade, growth, and poverty.
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/econ/panagariya/apecon/P ol icy%20Papers/miracles%20and%20debacles-panagariya. pdf
Virtually all growth miracles [of developing countries] we can identify are associated with rapid expansion of trade rather than wholesale substitution of imports by domestic production. Evidence also fails to point to a finger at free trade as the cause of economic failures... Few countries have grown rapidly without a simultaneous rapid expansion of trade... It is rare that countries have grown at 3% of more in per-capita income terms on a sustained basis and failed to reduce poverty.
Unlicensed 802.11 is a money-maker. It is just making money in a different fashion than most spectrum use - instead of one person paying a lot for one band, millions of people pay $50-$100 to 802.11 equipment makers.
It's good for the economy, and certainly a more economically efficient use of those frequencies than before 802.11.
There is an evolving standard for "hi-def radio" which used to be called IBOC (in-band, on-channel) but is now HD Radio. This technology augments existing analog AM and FM signals with additional digital modulation, allowing both new receivers to enhance the audio quality, and old receivers to remain compatable with the system. They claim it makes AM like FM, and FM like a CD.
Several radio stations are already broadcasting in HD radio.
The easiest and highest-gain 802.11 antennas to build are of the waveguide + horn variety. Horns can easilly get you as much as 12-16 dB additional gain over just a waveguide (e.g. Pringles can).
For example, check out this horn build from cardboard and aluminum foil.
Yagis and other antenna element arrays are just too tough to build right, especially without a SWR meter. At 802.11 frequencies, just go horn. Save the Yagi's for lower frequencies, like 10MHz, where a horn would be nuts.
Or take a look at Mexico. Imports of cheap products hasn't brought the country out of poverty. Instead, it brought a few laborers a little more money, while the majority went into the pockets of the rich minority who already dictate how the country runs.
Yes, and without that trade, those laborers would be even poorer. Is that what we want?
Why do you think Mexican workers flock to the Maquiladoras? Because it beats 1) the fields and 2) unemployment.
Mexican GDP benefits greatly from trade with US. The country is still very poor - it spent nearly a century of socialist/protectionist rule, and it still is only slowly aligning with the global economy.
It will take a while for the Mexican economy to grow, but it is. Trade is an important (but my no means the only) part of that.
It took about 50 years for South Korea to go from one of the poorest places on Earth to an economy that rivals some European countries. It did this to a large extent through trade. Mexico will also need a long time, 20-40 years, of continued growth before it will no longer be poor.
I'm sorry to say that there may be a lot of pretty sad "multicasting" of four channels of ~5 Mbps MPEG-2 video streams on many DTV channels when they are not running HD. Of course, this is better than the 1-2 Mbps MPEG-2 channels you see on DBS or digital cable, but still looks pretty bad to me.
The good news for digital cable subscribers is that cable MSOs are moving rapidly to try to offer HD on digital cable. They think they can offer more HD channels than DBS...but to get the space, they have to kick the old bandiwdth-wasting analog channels off of the cable systems.
This is incorrect. The DTV transition does not involve moving all TV broadcasters to UHF.
The intent is to move all TV broadcasters to the "core" channels 2 through 51, and reclaim UHF channels 52-59 and 60-69 for various non-TV purposes.
Of course, since VHF is pretty well used up in most areas, you will initially see a move to UHF DTV operations (while no one is watching it), but once it comes time for the analog phase-out, stations can choose to end their analog VHF broadcasts and move their DTV service to VHF.
TV stations making the DTV transition will try to stay away from UHF where possible, since it requires more power and more expensive equipment than VHF for equivalent signals.
As global trade was RISING during the late 90's, American unemployment was FALLING. Now that global trade has cooled, US unemployment has been RISING. Rising global trade (and higher US trade deficits) are correlated with higher US GDP rises and lower US unemployment.
By saving money through foreign trade, it means Americans can actually become richer. That means more jobs here.
Moreover, if offshore people are doing work for less, the products will become cheaper for American consumers, increasing our quality of life.
As a related example, I know someone who outsources his tedious CAD work to Russia over the Net - it means he can concentrate on higher level design issues.
BTW, the situation is not HARD in the US at all. Most countries on the planet would give anything for JUST 6% unemployment rate. IT got burnt by the bubble, but it is coming back. Recently a poll of 1400 US CIOs showed 10% expected to hire more people in 3Q 2003.
And when we talk about profits, let's not forget that over 50% of Americans are stock holders, so we all do benefit from increased profits as well.
Re:Mae-East
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
MAE EAST isn't really just a "place" any more, it is more of a concept, and exists in several places. MAE EAST is operated now by MCI.
I remember seeing it when it was a small room in an underground parking garage. Net techs left their cans of Mountain Dew in the corner.
Today MAE EAST ATM service is avalable in Vienna, Reston, and Ashburn. It has ceased to really be one room, one floor, or even just in one building.
Near the original MAE EAST is also a major AboveNet (now MFN) collocation facility. That is where Geeks in Space: Slashdot Radio used to be served from.
The best geocache I found had one of those hand-held battery-powered voice recorders in it. You could hear the voices of the last people who found the cache. Pretty cool!
Unlike (recently auctioned) cellphone spectrum, there is no real cost to broadcasters for the spectrum they use. TV and Radio channels are pretty much a first-come, first-serve issue with regard to licensing.
Perhaps commercial broadcasters should be forced to yearly re-lease their spectrum from the FCC in an auction, then we would have a true competitive marketplace.
Why didn't the local government activate the Emergency Alert System (EAS) broadcast that all radio and TV stations have by law? It is an automatic system that can insert information into broadcasts locally from Federal, state, or local officials, regardless of where the regular programming comes from, or whether there are any human beings running the station.
BTW, there are plenty of locally-owned radio stations that operate part of the day fully automated as well. How would they have reacted to this emergency? The same way.
Moreover, there are plenty of non-locally-owned radio and television stations that are staffed at all times, and can break into local programming with news flashes, even if most of their operations are centrally controlled.
I was intending to use WASTE to do secure p2p exchange of broadcast-quality MPEG-2 video files between television stations for co-production and regional distribution that was cost impractical to do by satellite.
Thanks for the info. BitTorrent seems to be a good solution for distributing bandwidth (probably over 100 Mbps for the 1000 simultaneous downloads), but perhaps we need to examine a more distributed model for the effort of tracking.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that Usenet feeds were approaching DS-3 speeds last time I checked (over a year ago), and are probably beyond that now.
Satellite is the only reasonably way to get a newsfeed these days (without paying $5,000-$10,000 per month for bandwidth), but even the satellite providers are running out of room using QPSK modulation on a single Ku-band transponder. Higher-order modulation would require a larger then 1m dish (well, maybe until DVB-S2 is standardized).
I don't know about letters, but it costs a lot to ship freight to Guam. I work for a network that has shifted from sending video tapes of broadcast material to Guam to shipping DVDs. The reduction of freight costs paid for the DVD burners and players in one year. American Samoa as well...
I wrote that on stationary bike. Very tired. Sorry poor english. If I stop, generator go out, kernel panic. Lost 40 pounds this way, Slashdot makes my workout much shorter.
Economics 101;
1) All free market transactions represent an increase in wealth for both parties, otherwise they wouldn't partake. The buyer thinks he is getting more than he paid, the seller thinks he is paid more than an item is worth to him
2) Redistributional taxes are wealth-neutral. $1 is still $1 regarless who spends it. Recent tax history shows no real GDP benefit or damage from tax cuts or increases of reasonable sizes.
2.5) Of course, if you nuts with tax rates, you can make everyone life a living hell and cause some GDP growth damage
3) On the other hand, periods of low inflation are orrelated with GDP growth, periods of high inflation correlated with GDP stagnation or decline
4) There is a 10-year boom/bust/boom business cycle in the US
5) Wealth destruction of taxes is when it is spent on things people don't value (how much is a B2 bomber worth to you?)
6) Spending is up at the Federal and Local levels. Some of it is probably going to waste...
7) Social Security and Medicare will go into deficit over the next 20 years, and massive changes will have to occur. Hold on!
8) US Farmers receive massive amounts of Federal subsidy, enough to cram out imports from many countries. EU farmers get even more.
9) The world is becoming more democratic and free-market, slowly. Growth is way up in formerly protectionist socialist India and formerly communist China.
10) It tok 50 years for South Korea to go from a dirt-poor country to an economy that rivals some European ones. Growth and poverty reduction take time.
The gain of a horn antenna is dependent on the size of the final aperature in wavelengths.
OK, I think I was overestimating a bit. It looks like for 2.4 GHz, a pyramidal horn with a 30cm x 30cm opening is about 14 dBi. That's probably going to be your typical "cardboard box" horn size.
It would take a pyramidal horn with an opening of 1m x 1m to be 25 dBi for 802.11b. That certainly is not impossible to build (use wood, not cardboard), but a lot easier than building the equivalent parabolic dish. It is all "straight lines."
Now for 802.11a (5 GHz), you can get a 25 dBi pyramidal horn with an aperature of only 50cm x 50cm...
Heh, I was a part of a space failure myself. We were using pretty much off-the-shelf equipment, but it passed NASA spec shake and thermal testing. What probably did it in was radiation...in low earth orbit we figured there wouldn't be much risk of radiation problems.
If we were to do it again, we probably would have had some kind of radiation-resistant reset system, because building the whole thing in rad-hard would be very expensive (our budget was $1500 plus donated equipment!) But having a few rad-hard devices to reset the box in case of a crash would probably have been affordable.
About 100 amateur radio operators contacted our payload, and relayed their GPS coordinates to others using amateur packet radio. At the same time, the GPS unit on board the Spartan satellite transmitted its position to listeners on the ground as well. But had it not crashed after about 17 hours, it is possible that several hundred other amateur radio operators would have used it.
The MTU limit on PPPoE also breaks Windows Terminal Services - which so stupid!
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/econ/panagariya/apecon/
Unlicensed 802.11 is a money-maker. It is just making money in a different fashion than most spectrum use - instead of one person paying a lot for one band, millions of people pay $50-$100 to 802.11 equipment makers.
It's good for the economy, and certainly a more economically efficient use of those frequencies than before 802.11.
There is an evolving standard for "hi-def radio" which used to be called IBOC (in-band, on-channel) but is now HD Radio. This technology augments existing analog AM and FM signals with additional digital modulation, allowing both new receivers to enhance the audio quality, and old receivers to remain compatable with the system. They claim it makes AM like FM, and FM like a CD.
Several radio stations are already broadcasting in HD radio.
The easiest and highest-gain 802.11 antennas to build are of the waveguide + horn variety. Horns can easilly get you as much as 12-16 dB additional gain over just a waveguide (e.g. Pringles can).
For example, check out this horn build from cardboard and aluminum foil.
Yagis and other antenna element arrays are just too tough to build right, especially without a SWR meter. At 802.11 frequencies, just go horn. Save the Yagi's for lower frequencies, like 10MHz, where a horn would be nuts.
Yes, and without that trade, those laborers would be even poorer. Is that what we want?
Why do you think Mexican workers flock to the Maquiladoras? Because it beats 1) the fields and 2) unemployment.
Mexican GDP benefits greatly from trade with US. The country is still very poor - it spent nearly a century of socialist/protectionist rule, and it still is only slowly aligning with the global economy.
It will take a while for the Mexican economy to grow, but it is. Trade is an important (but my no means the only) part of that.
It took about 50 years for South Korea to go from one of the poorest places on Earth to an economy that rivals some European countries. It did this to a large extent through trade. Mexico will also need a long time, 20-40 years, of continued growth before it will no longer be poor.
I'm sorry to say that there may be a lot of pretty sad "multicasting" of four channels of ~5 Mbps MPEG-2 video streams on many DTV channels when they are not running HD. Of course, this is better than the 1-2 Mbps MPEG-2 channels you see on DBS or digital cable, but still looks pretty bad to me.
The good news for digital cable subscribers is that cable MSOs are moving rapidly to try to offer HD on digital cable. They think they can offer more HD channels than DBS...but to get the space, they have to kick the old bandiwdth-wasting analog channels off of the cable systems.
This is incorrect. The DTV transition does not involve moving all TV broadcasters to UHF.
The intent is to move all TV broadcasters to the "core" channels 2 through 51, and reclaim UHF channels 52-59 and 60-69 for various non-TV purposes.
Of course, since VHF is pretty well used up in most areas, you will initially see a move to UHF DTV operations (while no one is watching it), but once it comes time for the analog phase-out, stations can choose to end their analog VHF broadcasts and move their DTV service to VHF.
TV stations making the DTV transition will try to stay away from UHF where possible, since it requires more power and more expensive equipment than VHF for equivalent signals.
As global trade was RISING during the late 90's, American unemployment was FALLING. Now that global trade has cooled, US unemployment has been RISING. Rising global trade (and higher US trade deficits) are correlated with higher US GDP rises and lower US unemployment.
By saving money through foreign trade, it means Americans can actually become richer. That means more jobs here.
Moreover, if offshore people are doing work for less, the products will become cheaper for American consumers, increasing our quality of life.
As a related example, I know someone who outsources his tedious CAD work to Russia over the Net - it means he can concentrate on higher level design issues.
BTW, the situation is not HARD in the US at all. Most countries on the planet would give anything for JUST 6% unemployment rate. IT got burnt by the bubble, but it is coming back. Recently a poll of 1400 US CIOs showed 10% expected to hire more people in 3Q 2003.
And when we talk about profits, let's not forget that over 50% of Americans are stock holders, so we all do benefit from increased profits as well.
MAE EAST isn't really just a "place" any more, it is more of a concept, and exists in several places. MAE EAST is operated now by MCI.
I remember seeing it when it was a small room in an underground parking garage. Net techs left their cans of Mountain Dew in the corner.
Today MAE EAST ATM service is avalable in Vienna, Reston, and Ashburn. It has ceased to really be one room, one floor, or even just in one building.
Near the original MAE EAST is also a major AboveNet (now MFN) collocation facility. That is where Geeks in Space: Slashdot Radio used to be served from.
The best geocache I found had one of those hand-held battery-powered voice recorders in it. You could hear the voices of the last people who found the cache. Pretty cool!
Unlike (recently auctioned) cellphone spectrum, there is no real cost to broadcasters for the spectrum they use. TV and Radio channels are pretty much a first-come, first-serve issue with regard to licensing.
Perhaps commercial broadcasters should be forced to yearly re-lease their spectrum from the FCC in an auction, then we would have a true competitive marketplace.
PBS has been covering the FCC media ownership rules on NOW with Bill Moyers and the NewHour.
Why didn't the local government activate the Emergency Alert System (EAS) broadcast that all radio and TV stations have by law? It is an automatic system that can insert information into broadcasts locally from Federal, state, or local officials, regardless of where the regular programming comes from, or whether there are any human beings running the station.
BTW, there are plenty of locally-owned radio stations that operate part of the day fully automated as well. How would they have reacted to this emergency? The same way.
Moreover, there are plenty of non-locally-owned radio and television stations that are staffed at all times, and can break into local programming with news flashes, even if most of their operations are centrally controlled.
I was intending to use WASTE to do secure p2p exchange of broadcast-quality MPEG-2 video files between television stations for co-production and regional distribution that was cost impractical to do by satellite.
Oh well...
Thanks for the info. BitTorrent seems to be a good solution for distributing bandwidth (probably over 100 Mbps for the 1000 simultaneous downloads), but perhaps we need to examine a more distributed model for the effort of tracking.
Yes, by now we were supposed to be blowing away those OC-192s with 3D tele-presence, smellovision, haptic interfaces, etc. Oh wait, that was all porn.
Yes, but how much CPU & bandwidth does a tracker really require?