I think if we do the math, my 28dB of S:N should be more than enough to extend that mile to 4. I'll find out in spring, it's too farking cold to play signal-strength games this time of year in my part of the world. It seems like 15dB of S:N is enough for a reliable link at least up to 2Mb/s (which is faster than the T1 feed we're working with, so it's fast enough). Not sure how fast signal falls off with this particular antenna, but easy enough to find out.
Point to point, 1 mile is a piece of cake. I have 28dB of signal:noise ratio, typcally. I haven't done the math to find out how that link would be at 2,5,or 10 miles, but you're welcome to. It's a "Mag grid antenna" from Andrew, which I bought from fab-corp.com, and the cartesian plots are available online.
What part of "last-mile solution" wasn't clear about my response? Backbones get you to the area you want to distribute the signal from, distribution gets you out from there. It's two different sets of requirements, as your misunderstanding comment even acknowledges.
Well, say goodbye to any form of high definition content streaming to your home over IP then.
Do the math. What's your bitrate from a DVD? IP may not be the appropriate solution for, er, _broadcast_. We've got these things called "satellite TV" and "cable TV" which fill that need just fine _at this time_.
Just don't go around asserting that things are fine the way they are and nothing should change, it only makes you look ignorant.
And likewise, don't go around asserting that people have made a statement that they have not; it makes you look like your argument is weak and you need to make up the opponent's points for them. Nowhere in my post did I say (or even imply) that change is bad or this technology shouldn't happen; please don't put words into my mouth.
My personal experience differs from your statement.
Unless using specialized antennas at both ends, 802.11 would not even be adequate from the utility pole to the house in many circumstances.
The "specialized antennas" are 50 or 60 bucks each, readily available online from many sources. I've been using standard, off-the-shelf Linksys WAP11's and a couple of 24dBi directional antennas, on an 802.11b link, for the last year. I'm 1.1 miles from my source, and have full T1 speeds up and down over this link. I haven't had any outages, from wind, snow, heat, or cold (and it was -7 farenheit this morning).
802.11b is just fine, today, for last-mile solutions, without violating any FCC regulations or custom-fabricating anything. It has even been mentioned a time or 50 on/. over the last year or two.
Even a pair of pringles cans could probably get you a mile.
Anyone who has any experience with wireless ethernet knows that the range is never as good as it's hyped up to be, especially through walls and such.
And yet, with a minimum of equipment, range and walls aren't relevant, for an installation which is no more complicated than installing a satellite dish.
I could see using this for a backbone to get the signal out to fringe areas, but for the last-mile to the consumer, 802.11b(g) is more than sufficient. When they start making noise about "replacement for DSL" - well...does enough bandwidth _exist_ that it makes sense to have 50Mb/second to your house? If the internet ever gets _that_ bloated that you need that fat of a pipe, it's time to turn off the computers and go outside.
I hope he takes the free publicity & does something good with it. If he can handle this gracefully and turn it into something positive, he can end up being seen doing so by the right people, and turn it into a good opportunity for himself.
Or, he can stay in his room and play with the new Xbox, that's OK too I suppose.
People can stop trying to hack 802.11[abg] into a long range protocol.
Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but I have a couple of questions:
1. How do you define "long range"? With a couple of directional antennas, a 1 mile 802.11b link is very solid. 2. Have you looked at the previous articles on slashdot on last-mile 802.11* solutions? One of them pointed to fab-corp.com who I have dealt with, and whose products, service, and information are top notch.
If with FAB's information you're still overwhelmed, there are lots of good resources on doing this, without having to resort to mangling floppy disks, paperclips, and pringles cans, all in ways that give you a robust, stable long range solution.
And yet, those are valid responses. Tivo _is_ more cost-effecttive, faster, and offers features that a home-rolled system just plain won't have. I'm sure the other points have validity also.
I suppose there are people looking for a project. I turn hardwood lumber into a combination of sawdust and furniture to kill time, even though I could buy furniture that looks almost as good, and costs often less than what it takes to build it. A guy's gotta have a hobby, and if they want that hobby to be building a pointless system that will underperform what they could buy commercially, well, at least they're not out installing Windows on unsuspecting old ladies' PCs or something.
Actually, if you need help with your "lower" circulation, you could check your inbox (or held-mail folder) for plenty of folks willing to sell you something to help with that.
Maybe this sort of thing appeals to the same people who make their PC tower look like some tricked-out alien egg or something, but I can't understand the appeal.
Is it the challenge, or the attention to detail, or what draws people to these?
Actually, I was just at rednova.com yesterday looking at archives of Nasa images, and not only is this explicitly mentioned, but for many of the false-color images, they specify the method by which they were constructed (shot thorough this filter, that filter, and the other filter, and recombined, that sort of thing).
The scientists understand the real colors, the public (who funds it, after all) expects it to be red. They want red, we'll give 'em red. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I understand where they're coming from.
The veracity of the person who brought this up (Mr. Martian Pyramids and such) isn't something I'll do much commenting on.
Unfortunately, unless you buy a cert from one of the officially blessed cert authorities, your users get this ugly-looking "security warning" popup from their browser. While this is fine for clued individuals, or internal sites and so on, things that are public-facing are more sensitive to that sort of thing.
It galls me every time I have to give someone on the officially "blessed CA" list money to do something I can do for myself in less time, but I don't know of an alternative that allows the public users of a secure website to not get alarming messages on their browser when they try to give us money.
NASA's budget last year was $20 billion or so, or about $70 per living American per year. Not a lot, really, but did we all get something beneficial out of it? $70 in a year could have bought me something I wanted or my family needed.
Hell, I got 70 bucks worth of entertainment checking out the website looking at mars pictures, just last night.
You are possibly (probably, based on your comments) unaware of the specific benefits that Nasa's research provides to you and your family, in what has become everyday objects as a direct result of the research they do. You can read the abstracts of these articles (and perhaps access the articles themselves; I didn't spend the time looking because you probably won't bother to go there at all) at this URL.
There are places where the government wastes your and my money, but research done in these government programs is not one of those places; the benefits are real, freely provided, and improve your quality of life every day, regardless of if you're aware of or appreciate it.
So, is it your contention that the high-tech research resulting from this, and the money spent, somehow doesn't benefit the general population? They spend that money on stuff...stuff that the citizens make. They spend that money on research - employing us. The results of that research then become consumer-grade products, which, guess what, benefit us.
This is like people carping about the cost of space programs..."All that money shot up into space when there are hungry chillllldrun" and all that. The money doesn't go away just because it's being spent, it gets spent to further jobs and technologies that employ and benefit us.
I work for a large, fairly conservative insurance company. We got "the letter" from SCO back in (March?), and legal had us draw up a list of mission-critical servers running Linux, so we'd know our level of exposure.
While legal and management seem to understand that it's a frivolous claim, they also correctly understand that being frivolous has never stopped the legal system from making dumb rulings. For reasons which are quite annoying, we are currently "on hold until this gets worked out" for several very interesting projects. This is real, folks. You know that SCO's claims are bullshit. I know that they're bullshit. Legal and management know they're bullshit, but one bad ruling and the waters get muddier for that much longer.
Remember - if SCO gets bought out without being legally slapped down first, they still win in their mission to spread FUD about Linux and the GPL. I firmly believe this is their real goal, because Linux and the GPL threaten certain people who stand to lose a whole lot because of it.
Bottom line, until SCO gets slapped down, my large employer isn't doing any more Linux projects. Solaris is an easy choice here, since we're using it widely already, but the cost savings to be realized are huge, if only we could put aside SCO's asinine behavior and get on with business.
Really? can Americans really learn to pronounce/recognize names from people of different cultures? during the interval of a helpdesk conversation?
One of the more interesting things about working at GE is the wide variety of folks you get to work with on a daily basis. We had a map in the cafeteria where people put stick-pins into their home towns, so we could see where everyone was from. With maybe 1000 people in the building, nearly every country you'd expect was represented.
If I call the helpdesk and am told I'm talking to Vinod, or Subbu, or Hari, or Suresh, of course I can recognize the name. I might even make a good effort to pronounce it right, and I _just_ might get the 'd' in Vinod right as a result of many sessions of the two of us working on just that.
This isn't about only hearing a particular accent, or working with someone from a particular country, only for helpdesk calls. It's about the choice to use individuals for that function whose accents are so thick that they're not understandable, or that they don't understand the caller, which is just as bad. Poor training and/or abilities are a separate issue, could happen with any helldesk outsourcing. But, outsourcing it to a group who know _nothing_ about the very non-generic systems they're supposed to be supporting, combined with more than occasional language/accent barriers, combined with the insulting "My name is Jim" ruse, isn't a recipe for a successful helpdesk outsourcing to _anywhere_.
So, yes, I'm saying if a helpdesk analyst tells me his name is "Manish", that I will be able to recognize the name, and quite likely his voice, if I get him next time. Spelling problems at Starbucks aren't the same as presenting oneself as someone they aren't in a corporate situation.
I worked for GE for well over a decade. I have dealt with the very people at GE-Wipro in Bangalore that this article glows about. My experience differs from that of the author.
In the beginning, the helpdesk was manned by GE employees, at the HQ of the business I worked in, in the US. Helpdesk is a hard position to keep staffed with quality people, for the reasons we all know. But, those pesky GE employees were _expensive_, so they walked the helpdesk out the door one day, and brought in an outside contractor known for doing helldesk outsourcing. And there was much rejoicing (at the VP level). Problem is, helpdesk quality fell drastically, as there was a crop of new people who didn't know the intricacies of the systems they were supposed to be supporting.
Soon, (coinciding, I suppose, with the end of the contract with Keane), it was noticed that the helpdesk was sucking. Rather than acknowledge the mistake, they decided to compound it. With great fanfare and jubilation, they were pleased to announce that the helldesk was being reworked. Oh, by the way, it's being run by a company called "Wipro" in Bangalore, India.
Initially, there were many problems. Eventually, it got worse. Helpdesk analysts who could not be understood by a western ear, utterly wrong advice, that sort of thing. One coworker of mine, having a bad battery (the Dell explode-o-cell model), called to get a new one. He was told to delete his hardware profiles and that would take care of it. Not just wrong, but damagingly wrong, and not even vaguely logical. Yeah, a battery is "hardware", but that's pushing it. The analysts would identify themselves as "Jim" and "Bob". Just this is insulting - as if we can't learn how to pronounce or recognize the name of someone from a different culture than ours? It's just a sign of not understanding the needs and/or culture of the clients.
A final note - the article seems to be holding this up as a glowing success. I think it's more than coincidence that GE stock has been consistantly underperforming the market for many years - since the day Jack Welch announced his replacement, in fact. GE was succeeding because of Welch, not because his replacement is sacrificing quality for cost, calling it a "Six Sigma quality initiative", and ignoring the failures that result.
Hopefully, business executives who read this article, will do a sanity check & see how GE is doing these days, before deciding to emulate a formerly glorious company's unproven CEO's failing strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey...I'm a shareholder in VA Linux, you insensitive clod...
Nice thing is, if I sold all my shares, I might have enough money to buy a slashdot subscription.
the -3dB angle is 5.6 degrees wide. Haven't done the math yet.
I think if we do the math, my 28dB of S:N should be more than enough to extend that mile to 4. I'll find out in spring, it's too farking cold to play signal-strength games this time of year in my part of the world. It seems like 15dB of S:N is enough for a reliable link at least up to 2Mb/s (which is faster than the T1 feed we're working with, so it's fast enough). Not sure how fast signal falls off with this particular antenna, but easy enough to find out.
Point to point, 1 mile is a piece of cake. I have 28dB of signal:noise ratio, typcally. I haven't done the math to find out how that link would be at 2,5,or 10 miles, but you're welcome to. It's a "Mag grid antenna" from Andrew, which I bought from fab-corp.com, and the cartesian plots are available online.
What part of "last-mile solution" wasn't clear about my response? Backbones get you to the area you want to distribute the signal from, distribution gets you out from there. It's two different sets of requirements, as your misunderstanding comment even acknowledges.
Well, say goodbye to any form of high definition content streaming to your home over IP then.
Do the math. What's your bitrate from a DVD? IP may not be the appropriate solution for, er, _broadcast_. We've got these things called "satellite TV" and "cable TV" which fill that need just fine _at this time_.
Just don't go around asserting that things are fine the way they are and nothing should change, it only makes you look ignorant.
And likewise, don't go around asserting that people have made a statement that they have not; it makes you look like your argument is weak and you need to make up the opponent's points for them. Nowhere in my post did I say (or even imply) that change is bad or this technology shouldn't happen; please don't put words into my mouth.
No, 802.11 anything is not sufficient.
/. over the last year or two.
My personal experience differs from your statement.
Unless using specialized antennas at both ends, 802.11 would not even be adequate from the utility pole to the house in many circumstances.
The "specialized antennas" are 50 or 60 bucks each, readily available online from many sources. I've been using standard, off-the-shelf Linksys WAP11's and a couple of 24dBi directional antennas, on an 802.11b link, for the last year. I'm 1.1 miles from my source, and have full T1 speeds up and down over this link. I haven't had any outages, from wind, snow, heat, or cold (and it was -7 farenheit this morning).
802.11b is just fine, today, for last-mile solutions, without violating any FCC regulations or custom-fabricating anything. It has even been mentioned a time or 50 on
Even a pair of pringles cans could probably get you a mile.
Anyone who has any experience with wireless ethernet knows that the range is never as good as it's hyped up to be, especially through walls and such.
And yet, with a minimum of equipment, range and walls aren't relevant, for an installation which is no more complicated than installing a satellite dish.
I could see using this for a backbone to get the signal out to fringe areas, but for the last-mile to the consumer, 802.11b(g) is more than sufficient. When they start making noise about "replacement for DSL" - well...does enough bandwidth _exist_ that it makes sense to have 50Mb/second to your house? If the internet ever gets _that_ bloated that you need that fat of a pipe, it's time to turn off the computers and go outside.
Great point, but I think you missed the thread you wanted by a few inches.
I hope he takes the free publicity & does something good with it. If he can handle this gracefully and turn it into something positive, he can end up being seen doing so by the right people, and turn it into a good opportunity for himself.
Or, he can stay in his room and play with the new Xbox, that's OK too I suppose.
People can stop trying to hack 802.11[abg] into a long range protocol.
Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but I have a couple of questions:
1. How do you define "long range"? With a couple of directional antennas, a 1 mile 802.11b link is very solid.
2. Have you looked at the previous articles on slashdot on last-mile 802.11* solutions? One of them pointed to fab-corp.com who I have dealt with, and whose products, service, and information are top notch.
If with FAB's information you're still overwhelmed, there are lots of good resources on doing this, without having to resort to mangling floppy disks, paperclips, and pringles cans, all in ways that give you a robust, stable long range solution.
And yet, those are valid responses. Tivo _is_ more cost-effecttive, faster, and offers features that a home-rolled system just plain won't have. I'm sure the other points have validity also.
I suppose there are people looking for a project. I turn hardwood lumber into a combination of sawdust and furniture to kill time, even though I could buy furniture that looks almost as good, and costs often less than what it takes to build it. A guy's gotta have a hobby, and if they want that hobby to be building a pointless system that will underperform what they could buy commercially, well, at least they're not out installing Windows on unsuspecting old ladies' PCs or something.
Ah. There you go; dissipate the heat from the CPU into your hands; transfers the heat from where you don't want it, to where you do.
Makes the whole wireless keyboard a bit useless, but there you go.
Actually, if you need help with your "lower" circulation, you could check your inbox (or held-mail folder) for plenty of folks willing to sell you something to help with that.
man sort
man grep
I wonder how long most ISPs keep their logs linking usernames to IP addresses.
I suspect there may be some policies written very quickly, to say "not long at all".
Well, the car certainly isn't gonna help him much in his quest to find out, I'm afraid.
Maybe this sort of thing appeals to the same people who make their PC tower look like some tricked-out alien egg or something, but I can't understand the appeal.
Is it the challenge, or the attention to detail, or what draws people to these?
Actually, I was just at rednova.com yesterday looking at archives of Nasa images, and not only is this explicitly mentioned, but for many of the false-color images, they specify the method by which they were constructed (shot thorough this filter, that filter, and the other filter, and recombined, that sort of thing).
The scientists understand the real colors, the public (who funds it, after all) expects it to be red. They want red, we'll give 'em red. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I understand where they're coming from.
The veracity of the person who brought this up (Mr. Martian Pyramids and such) isn't something I'll do much commenting on.
Unfortunately, unless you buy a cert from one of the officially blessed cert authorities, your users get this ugly-looking "security warning" popup from their browser. While this is fine for clued individuals, or internal sites and so on, things that are public-facing are more sensitive to that sort of thing.
It galls me every time I have to give someone on the officially "blessed CA" list money to do something I can do for myself in less time, but I don't know of an alternative that allows the public users of a secure website to not get alarming messages on their browser when they try to give us money.
NASA's budget last year was $20 billion or so, or about $70 per living American per year. Not a lot, really, but did we all get something beneficial out of it? $70 in a year could have bought me something I wanted or my family needed.
Hell, I got 70 bucks worth of entertainment checking out the website looking at mars pictures, just last night.
You are possibly (probably, based on your comments) unaware of the specific benefits that Nasa's research provides to you and your family, in what has become everyday objects as a direct result of the research they do. You can read the abstracts of these articles (and perhaps access the articles themselves; I didn't spend the time looking because you probably won't bother to go there at all) at this URL.
There are places where the government wastes your and my money, but research done in these government programs is not one of those places; the benefits are real, freely provided, and improve your quality of life every day, regardless of if you're aware of or appreciate it.
So, is it your contention that the high-tech research resulting from this, and the money spent, somehow doesn't benefit the general population? They spend that money on stuff...stuff that the citizens make. They spend that money on research - employing us. The results of that research then become consumer-grade products, which, guess what, benefit us.
This is like people carping about the cost of space programs..."All that money shot up into space when there are hungry chillllldrun" and all that. The money doesn't go away just because it's being spent, it gets spent to further jobs and technologies that employ and benefit us.
I work for a large, fairly conservative insurance company. We got "the letter" from SCO back in (March?), and legal had us draw up a list of mission-critical servers running Linux, so we'd know our level of exposure.
While legal and management seem to understand that it's a frivolous claim, they also correctly understand that being frivolous has never stopped the legal system from making dumb rulings. For reasons which are quite annoying, we are currently "on hold until this gets worked out" for several very interesting projects. This is real, folks. You know that SCO's claims are bullshit. I know that they're bullshit. Legal and management know they're bullshit, but one bad ruling and the waters get muddier for that much longer.
Remember - if SCO gets bought out without being legally slapped down first, they still win in their mission to spread FUD about Linux and the GPL. I firmly believe this is their real goal, because Linux and the GPL threaten certain people who stand to lose a whole lot because of it.
Bottom line, until SCO gets slapped down, my large employer isn't doing any more Linux projects. Solaris is an easy choice here, since we're using it widely already, but the cost savings to be realized are huge, if only we could put aside SCO's asinine behavior and get on with business.
I've _got_ to make several of these: www.backyardartillery.com
Really? can Americans really learn to pronounce/recognize names from people of different cultures? during the interval of a helpdesk conversation?
One of the more interesting things about working at GE is the wide variety of folks you get to work with on a daily basis. We had a map in the cafeteria where people put stick-pins into their home towns, so we could see where everyone was from. With maybe 1000 people in the building, nearly every country you'd expect was represented.
If I call the helpdesk and am told I'm talking to Vinod, or Subbu, or Hari, or Suresh, of course I can recognize the name. I might even make a good effort to pronounce it right, and I _just_ might get the 'd' in Vinod right as a result of many sessions of the two of us working on just that.
This isn't about only hearing a particular accent, or working with someone from a particular country, only for helpdesk calls. It's about the choice to use individuals for that function whose accents are so thick that they're not understandable, or that they don't understand the caller, which is just as bad. Poor training and/or abilities are a separate issue, could happen with any helldesk outsourcing. But, outsourcing it to a group who know _nothing_ about the very non-generic systems they're supposed to be supporting, combined with more than occasional language/accent barriers, combined with the insulting "My name is Jim" ruse, isn't a recipe for a successful helpdesk outsourcing to _anywhere_.
So, yes, I'm saying if a helpdesk analyst tells me his name is "Manish", that I will be able to recognize the name, and quite likely his voice, if I get him next time. Spelling problems at Starbucks aren't the same as presenting oneself as someone they aren't in a corporate situation.
I worked for GE for well over a decade. I have dealt with the very people at GE-Wipro in Bangalore that this article glows about. My experience differs from that of the author.
In the beginning, the helpdesk was manned by GE employees, at the HQ of the business I worked in, in the US. Helpdesk is a hard position to keep staffed with quality people, for the reasons we all know. But, those pesky GE employees were _expensive_, so they walked the helpdesk out the door one day, and brought in an outside contractor known for doing helldesk outsourcing. And there was much rejoicing (at the VP level). Problem is, helpdesk quality fell drastically, as there was a crop of new people who didn't know the intricacies of the systems they were supposed to be supporting.
Soon, (coinciding, I suppose, with the end of the contract with Keane), it was noticed that the helpdesk was sucking. Rather than acknowledge the mistake, they decided to compound it. With great fanfare and jubilation, they were pleased to announce that the helldesk was being reworked. Oh, by the way, it's being run by a company called "Wipro" in Bangalore, India.
Initially, there were many problems. Eventually, it got worse. Helpdesk analysts who could not be understood by a western ear, utterly wrong advice, that sort of thing. One coworker of mine, having a bad battery (the Dell explode-o-cell model), called to get a new one. He was told to delete his hardware profiles and that would take care of it. Not just wrong, but damagingly wrong, and not even vaguely logical. Yeah, a battery is "hardware", but that's pushing it. The analysts would identify themselves as "Jim" and "Bob". Just this is insulting - as if we can't learn how to pronounce or recognize the name of someone from a different culture than ours? It's just a sign of not understanding the needs and/or culture of the clients.
A final note - the article seems to be holding this up as a glowing success. I think it's more than coincidence that GE stock has been consistantly underperforming the market for many years - since the day Jack Welch announced his replacement, in fact. GE was succeeding because of Welch, not because his replacement is sacrificing quality for cost, calling it a "Six Sigma quality initiative", and ignoring the failures that result.
Hopefully, business executives who read this article, will do a sanity check & see how GE is doing these days, before deciding to emulate a formerly glorious company's unproven CEO's failing strategy.