Low quality power -- as in heat or high-entropy variants?:) I guess it is more a matter of power with too much variation in frequency and voltage.
I think there will have to be some strict requirements as to frequency and waveforms, and definitely no sawtooth (which contains a number of harmonics that tend to be attenuated in transformers and such devices anyways)
As for interconnecting the continents I think the easiest way of dealing with the different system frequencies 50 Hz and 60 Hz, would be through a DC link. DC conversion would also limit problems with localized voltage spikes and variable frequencies.
nah... based on the primitive element we would get:
0000 The Void
0001 Earth
0010 Wind
0011 Sandblasting
0100 Fire
0101 Bricks
0110 Dragon-breath
0111 A durable disco group
1000 Water
1001 Mud
1010 Carbonated soft drinks
1011 Bad weather
1100 Tequila
1101 Whisky on the rocks
1110 Champagne
1111 Life, the universe and everything less 27
I guess one could make a bistable element by cross-connecting two of these. Still, it would be a lot more interesting if they can at least come up with some kind of 2-input gate. Then they probably would have to worry about fan-out and fan-in.
Except... how long do these things stay in the gut? Even assuming they would not be damaged by the acids and the rest of the chemical process in the digestive tract, these tags would eventually make their way out, so any spooks would have to update the info frequently lest they end up looking for their targets in the sewage works.
And if the chip were not eventually excreted, we would have ourselves an interesting new disease on our hands: RFID-chip poisoning.
Even if the BPL goes out in an area during a disaster, it would still affect reception in other areas. And the way the signals at some of these frequencies propagate may result in BPL interference from far away.
Then there is possible international issues as the ionosphere doesn't obey any kinds of national borders when propagating signals. What if a US BPL installation interferes with radio communication in an emergency in China?
Now on to your question. All kinds of overhead transmission wires can and will act as long-wire antennas and will spread these signals around. Underground cables could be less radiating, depending on what configuration they are. Thus, I would expect a 3-core cable which is three conductors twisted like a rope to contain the signals better than three individual one-core cables laid side by side. However, once these cables emerge and connect to the wiring in your house, all bets are off. I would expect the house wiring to be the biggest radiator in suburban areas where the grid is underground.
Note that "long" in this context means longer than the wavelength of the signals. For a wideband signal like BPL, the shortest wavelengths are on the order of 2 meters, (7 ft)so any piece of wire longer than about 1/4 of this can radiate some of this signal. The longer the wire, the better the radiator and the more signal is emitted and interferes. The low frequency end of the BPL spectrum has wavelengths on the order of 300 meters or 1000 feet, so even a little neighborhood-sized power spur line could radiate a lot.
Considering that the power distribution network is designed for 50 Hz or 60 Hz and most components were either designed to block high frequencies or never had any specs for these high frequencies, there could be a lot of rework needed.
Just look at a commonly seen energy meter for example; an electromechanical meter of the kind counting your consumed kilowatt-hours. This is basically a big series inductor, which does a good job of blocking these high frequency signals. So every house may need some kind of RF meter bypass or at least the old electromechanical meters may need to be replaced. Everywhere.
Stringing fibers along the power-line rights of way would be a much better way of distributing these data signals. It might even be less expensive than trying to pass high frequency signals through devices handling high voltages. Some kind of bridge for the "last mile" appears to be necessary anyways.
The chunks you end up with after performing this infinite division may be too small to be useable for anything. Various kinds of radio communication or broadcasts require a certain minimum bandwidth in order to be useable. Generally, the lower carrier frequency you have the narrower is the available bandwidth, and this places constraints on what kinds of modulation you may use.
Another big constraining factor is the way the ionosphere interact with radio signals. No legal concept such as Eminent Domain is going to change this, or even be relevant. Signals at the various HF and VHF bands (0.3 MHz to 300 MHz) behave quite differently depending on thier frequency. Some (around 1 MHz) allow for long-distance communication during the night, others depend on the solar activity, and range of signals here varies with a period of 11 years; most of the higher frequencies work best with point-to-point communications. Arbitrarily shifting allocations of this around at the whim of legislators will make little sense.
Your example with modems and ISPs describes a utility-customer relationship, in this case the utility may change its terms of service in order to give what they consider "better service", obsoleting equipment in the process. Ham radio by contrast is peer-to-peer, each individual operator may and does communicate with each other with no central office full of equipment between them. Thus, as long as my receiver can pick up your transmitter and vice versa, we can chat or whatever -- it doesn't matter if my radio was made in 1930 and yours made in 2003. Old radio equipment becomes obsolete much as old cars do; they may have difficulties with spare parts availability, but if they are in proper working order and your licence is valid, you're good to go.
If I were to draw any further analogy, I'd say ham radio is like ships at sea, each ship has to be seaworthy (transmitters have to meet certain requirements), each captain has to have the proper certificates (each operator is required to be licensed, with some leeway in emergencies), and there are rules of behavior on the sea (power and frequency limits), which are determined in large part by international treaties (WARC, CEPT etc) and with national governments having organizations that enforce these (such as FCC). The medium (ocean or spectrum) upon which all operate is a natural resource which needs to be parcelled out to all, with nobody being allowed to hog it.
Except that they must do this via legal means. Illegal means won't do.
Thus suing IBM for something that is perceived as a contract violation might be OK. Their subsequent behavior here seems iffy and it does not help their case, but their starting point was decent.
However, asking everyone who is using Linux in one form or another to pay them big $$ without more than an unsubstantiated claim of having IP rights to something not of their origin... that is not a way to please any stockholders.
It is as if I said, "OK, all . characters are belong to me, so please render payment of $35 per period you have ever used" It is pretty obvious that such a money-raising scheme is not a durable one.
Some of these latest emissions from the SCO begs the question of whether they have any lawyers there at all. If so, they do not appear to be very effective, or they would have been able to stop the latest racketeering attempts.
So this is how it will play out; SCO says, I see your extorsion charge and raise a conspiracy. Like, who is conspiring here anyways?
And copyright infringement? Where exactly is Red Hat infringing, and why has SCO not produced anything that even suggests, far the less proves, any such infringement? Remember it is SCO who has to come up with this, everyone can do a
find/usr/src -exec grep -i sco {} \;
and be none the wiser...
Sounds like there is a need for some kind of "put up or shut up" here
The claims of GPL "virulence" probably comes from this: If I find a useful library which happen to be GPL, I must also GPL allmy code which is using this in order to legally distribute it. Depending on who this "I" is, this can be anything from a non-issue to a fatal flaw.
Replace the "I" with "a company who has competition and trade secrets" and then see where the problem lies with GPL vs. a desire for keeping certain business secrets. It can be argued forever whether this is how things should be; for now we have to live with the way things are.
FORTRAN: SPICE (Simulation Program for Integrated Circuit Emulation IIRC). Newer versions may have been ported to C but the original one was definitely FORTRAN.
C: UNIX, GNU, Linux are mostly written in C. So is much of Microsoft's Windows products, for better or for worse.
All of these are already historically significant, but by the same token the source code is around still. It is the orphaned systems that will be lost. Somehow I don't think people will have a big problem with these languages. Considering how we still have information about Old English and Old Norse written in Runes and Latin letters.
In fact, as the Latin alphabet is the one all these traditional programming languages use, there must be a big catastrophy before all the meaning of these characters are lost. Plain ASCII likewise may likewise survive, even if only one table is stored somewhere.
Heck, just make sure that copies of K&&R are stashed everywhere; these will serve as Rosetta stones for all C code at least.
Actually, the key technology for Microsoft's server software *is* an open standard -- DCE RPC.
However, there is no open source implementation, but that doesn't make it any less of a standard. (A greater question is if one even wants DCE RPC for anything other than interoperability.)
What about FreeDCE ? It doesn't seem to cover all the various modes that the MS-DCE/RPC does, but it does at least make it possible for programs on one platform to talk to the other.
I think it is mostly to do with the internal electronics not being able to deal with multiple keys being held down at once.
Seems like we have come full circle. Considering that the QWERTY layout originally was designed to avoid the typing hammers of common digraphs to bang into each other.
The cure for this might be to wire the internals of the keyboard to avoid rollover problems with common digraphs. ER, CK, ST, OP, and TH come to mind
I second the recommendations for the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Tech Museum in San Jose in particular. Used to be a number of surplus and electronics stores there as well -- a few such as Halted Specialties and ACE (Advanced Component Electronics) are still worth a visit at least. Then there is the Foothill Electronics Flea Market. See
this for some recent details on these.
And while there, take a trip to Livermore Fire Station #6 and see the lightbulb that has been burning for more than a hundred years!
Actually, putting the washing machine on the net might be a useful first step in figuring out where all the odd socks go.
The second step would be to create some local and regional SETI-at-home style surveillance programs, this may eventually come up with some information on exactly where these vanish to.
Now all we need is a good acronym and we'll be all set!
Now, NAT is a pain in the neck, so I can well see the need for IPv6. However, the idea of dynamic configuration of local equipment DHCP-style sounds like it would be useful.
Otherwise, would we have to set addresses of our household equipment using thumbwheel-switches or some software equivalent? "Lemme see -- the boiler-room controller gets X.0.0.0.100, the fridge gets X.0.0.0.101" and so on where X is all the higher-bits of the house IPv6-address.
Even if parts of the address is predetermined (as it is with devices for I2C-buses or PCI Cards). I guess that one could have the devices figure out their addresses by trying them in order and see what is available...
Then there is the naming of these, what would the hostnames be? Since we are on a global network, would it all have to be something unique like "fridge1.someroad99.12345.tld", "boilercontrol.someroad99.12345.tld" and so on and so forth. This probably would work when moving to somewhere with another language, so the fridge may become "kjøleskap.enellerannenvei171.9990.no" or some such. Looks like some kind of in-house DNS server would be very useful here.
All this is assuming that we want to have our household appliances on the 'net at all. I am perfectly capable of buying new food as it is being eaten, I don't need my fridge to put in an order for more beer and onions and whatever by itself. Still this could be useful for some people.
My guess is that ordinary police would ask you to take a hike. The police probably does prioritize situations where life and limb is at stake. They'd be more interested in catching you speeding on that road trip if anything.
Possibly the Economic Crime unit would have more interest in you, but then again, it may depend on whether you are worth their while.
Besides, isn't these laws primarily civil, not criminal anyways?
I'd say XPDF is at least close to a reasonable name. Considering that the reference application is called Acrobat... what kind of circus act are we getting ourselves into here if we didn't know better?
It's just because of marketing exposure and brand name recognition that we do know better.
Someone in Europe's evidently has already done this. This picture shows a 230V mains-to-RJ45 adapter cord, all nice moulded-on plugs and all.
Makes the RS232-mains adapter set I made once when needing a long serial line and having an extension cord available look rather primitive.
Re:This would be really sweet mounted on a car bum
on
Giant "Inkjet Printer"
·
· Score: 1
I'm actually pretty surprised no one has built one yet. Although I'm sure the local laws have some idiotic provision against writing on highways with non-toxic temporary paint.
A while back, IBM had a campaign where they were painting Tux and hearts on the curbs in several cities. As I can remember, the city council of San Francisco was not amused... so there most likely and unfortunately seem to be laws against putting paint on the roads. This does not detract from the fact that this sounds like a cool idea!
Slashdot Mirror
I think there will have to be some strict requirements as to frequency and waveforms, and definitely no sawtooth (which contains a number of harmonics that tend to be attenuated in transformers and such devices anyways)
As for interconnecting the continents I think the easiest way of dealing with the different system frequencies 50 Hz and 60 Hz, would be through a DC link. DC conversion would also limit problems with localized voltage spikes and variable frequencies.
0000 The Void
0001 Earth
0010 Wind
0011 Sandblasting
0100 Fire
0101 Bricks
0110 Dragon-breath
0111 A durable disco group
1000 Water
1001 Mud
1010 Carbonated soft drinks
1011 Bad weather
1100 Tequila
1101 Whisky on the rocks
1110 Champagne
1111 Life, the universe and everything less 27
Still, the amount of things undisclosed here, by itself, oughtta wake up someone. There's starting to be too much of it.
My bet is on pump&&dump...
Somehow, I don't think they're there yet.
Pr0nons would probably generate hardons however...
Actually there are two places called Sigma and Tou in south-west Norway ... perhaps there were Greeks there once too.
And if the chip were not eventually excreted, we would have ourselves an interesting new disease on our hands: RFID-chip poisoning.
This scheme appears broken either way.
If it was so it might be, and if it were so it would be, but as it isn't it ain't.
And James Bond is fictional, despite all claims to the contrary.
Then there is possible international issues as the ionosphere doesn't obey any kinds of national borders when propagating signals. What if a US BPL installation interferes with radio communication in an emergency in China?
Now on to your question. All kinds of overhead transmission wires can and will act as long-wire antennas and will spread these signals around. Underground cables could be less radiating, depending on what configuration they are. Thus, I would expect a 3-core cable which is three conductors twisted like a rope to contain the signals better than three individual one-core cables laid side by side. However, once these cables emerge and connect to the wiring in your house, all bets are off. I would expect the house wiring to be the biggest radiator in suburban areas where the grid is underground.
Note that "long" in this context means longer than the wavelength of the signals. For a wideband signal like BPL, the shortest wavelengths are on the order of 2 meters, (7 ft)so any piece of wire longer than about 1/4 of this can radiate some of this signal. The longer the wire, the better the radiator and the more signal is emitted and interferes. The low frequency end of the BPL spectrum has wavelengths on the order of 300 meters or 1000 feet, so even a little neighborhood-sized power spur line could radiate a lot.
Considering that the power distribution network is designed for 50 Hz or 60 Hz and most components were either designed to block high frequencies or never had any specs for these high frequencies, there could be a lot of rework needed.
Just look at a commonly seen energy meter for example; an electromechanical meter of the kind counting your consumed kilowatt-hours. This is basically a big series inductor, which does a good job of blocking these high frequency signals. So every house may need some kind of RF meter bypass or at least the old electromechanical meters may need to be replaced. Everywhere.
Stringing fibers along the power-line rights of way would be a much better way of distributing these data signals. It might even be less expensive than trying to pass high frequency signals through devices handling high voltages. Some kind of bridge for the "last mile" appears to be necessary anyways.
Another big constraining factor is the way the ionosphere interact with radio signals. No legal concept such as Eminent Domain is going to change this, or even be relevant. Signals at the various HF and VHF bands (0.3 MHz to 300 MHz) behave quite differently depending on thier frequency. Some (around 1 MHz) allow for long-distance communication during the night, others depend on the solar activity, and range of signals here varies with a period of 11 years; most of the higher frequencies work best with point-to-point communications. Arbitrarily shifting allocations of this around at the whim of legislators will make little sense.
Your example with modems and ISPs describes a utility-customer relationship, in this case the utility may change its terms of service in order to give what they consider "better service", obsoleting equipment in the process. Ham radio by contrast is peer-to-peer, each individual operator may and does communicate with each other with no central office full of equipment between them. Thus, as long as my receiver can pick up your transmitter and vice versa, we can chat or whatever -- it doesn't matter if my radio was made in 1930 and yours made in 2003. Old radio equipment becomes obsolete much as old cars do; they may have difficulties with spare parts availability, but if they are in proper working order and your licence is valid, you're good to go.
If I were to draw any further analogy, I'd say ham radio is like ships at sea, each ship has to be seaworthy (transmitters have to meet certain requirements), each captain has to have the proper certificates (each operator is required to be licensed, with some leeway in emergencies), and there are rules of behavior on the sea (power and frequency limits), which are determined in large part by international treaties (WARC, CEPT etc) and with national governments having organizations that enforce these (such as FCC). The medium (ocean or spectrum) upon which all operate is a natural resource which needs to be parcelled out to all, with nobody being allowed to hog it.
Except that they must do this via legal means. Illegal means won't do.
Thus suing IBM for something that is perceived as a contract violation might be OK. Their subsequent behavior here seems iffy and it does not help their case, but their starting point was decent.
However, asking everyone who is using Linux in one form or another to pay them big $$ without more than an unsubstantiated claim of having IP rights to something not of their origin... that is not a way to please any stockholders.
It is as if I said, "OK, all . characters are belong to me, so please render payment of $35 per period you have ever used" It is pretty obvious that such a money-raising scheme is not a durable one.
Some of these latest emissions from the SCO begs the question of whether they have any lawyers there at all. If so, they do not appear to be very effective, or they would have been able to stop the latest racketeering attempts.
So this is how it will play out; SCO says, I see your extorsion charge and raise a conspiracy. Like, who is conspiring here anyways?
And copyright infringement? Where exactly is Red Hat infringing, and why has SCO not produced anything that even suggests, far the less proves, any such infringement? Remember it is SCO who has to come up with this, everyone can do a find /usr/src -exec grep -i sco {} \;
and be none the wiser...
Sounds like there is a need for some kind of "put up or shut up" here
Replace the "I" with "a company who has competition and trade secrets" and then see where the problem lies with GPL vs. a desire for keeping certain business secrets. It can be argued forever whether this is how things should be; for now we have to live with the way things are.
C: UNIX, GNU, Linux are mostly written in C. So is much of Microsoft's Windows products, for better or for worse.
All of these are already historically significant, but by the same token the source code is around still. It is the orphaned systems that will be lost. Somehow I don't think people will have a big problem with these languages. Considering how we still have information about Old English and Old Norse written in Runes and Latin letters.
In fact, as the Latin alphabet is the one all these traditional programming languages use, there must be a big catastrophy before all the meaning of these characters are lost. Plain ASCII likewise may likewise survive, even if only one table is stored somewhere.
Heck, just make sure that copies of K&&R are stashed everywhere; these will serve as Rosetta stones for all C code at least.
However, there is no open source implementation, but that doesn't make it any less of a standard. (A greater question is if one even wants DCE RPC for anything other than interoperability.)
What about FreeDCE ? It doesn't seem to cover all the various modes that the MS-DCE/RPC does, but it does at least make it possible for programs on one platform to talk to the other.
Seems like we have come full circle. Considering that the QWERTY layout originally was designed to avoid the typing hammers of common digraphs to bang into each other.
The cure for this might be to wire the internals of the keyboard to avoid rollover problems with common digraphs. ER, CK, ST, OP, and TH come to mind
And while there, take a trip to Livermore Fire Station #6 and see the lightbulb that has been burning for more than a hundred years!
The second step would be to create some local and regional SETI-at-home style surveillance programs, this may eventually come up with some information on exactly where these vanish to.
Now all we need is a good acronym and we'll be all set!
Otherwise, would we have to set addresses of our household equipment using thumbwheel-switches or some software equivalent? "Lemme see -- the boiler-room controller gets X.0.0.0.100, the fridge gets X.0.0.0.101" and so on where X is all the higher-bits of the house IPv6-address.
Even if parts of the address is predetermined (as it is with devices for I2C-buses or PCI Cards). I guess that one could have the devices figure out their addresses by trying them in order and see what is available...
Then there is the naming of these, what would the hostnames be? Since we are on a global network, would it all have to be something unique like "fridge1.someroad99.12345.tld", "boilercontrol.someroad99.12345.tld" and so on and so forth. This probably would work when moving to somewhere with another language, so the fridge may become "kjøleskap.enellerannenvei171.9990.no" or some such. Looks like some kind of in-house DNS server would be very useful here.
All this is assuming that we want to have our household appliances on the 'net at all. I am perfectly capable of buying new food as it is being eaten, I don't need my fridge to put in an order for more beer and onions and whatever by itself. Still this could be useful for some people.
UDP? as in Usenet Death Penalty? That could really be a problem!
Possibly the Economic Crime unit would have more interest in you, but then again, it may depend on whether you are worth their while.
Besides, isn't these laws primarily civil, not criminal anyways?
It's just because of marketing exposure and brand name recognition that we do know better.
Makes the RS232-mains adapter set I made once when needing a long serial line and having an extension cord available look rather primitive.
A while back, IBM had a campaign where they were painting Tux and hearts on the curbs in several cities. As I can remember, the city council of San Francisco was not amused ... so there most likely and unfortunately seem to be laws against putting paint on the roads. This does not detract from the fact that this sounds like a cool idea!