I had my (G7CKF)UK Class B licence, that's the no-morse VHF and above one from the late '80s to the early '90s. And like the original poster I gave it up because I got sick of the old farts.
At the time the amateur radio community in the UK was run mostly by people who got their G3 licences in the 1950s and spent most of their time sitting on 80M(3.5MHz) talking about their gardens and what they did in tne war. These people were anti anything that they percieved to threaten the way amateur radio had been for them all those years ago (73 OM and all that) and the morse test was a key(sorry:) bastion of their defence against what they saw as an advance of CB-ers into 'their' patch. The fact that most of the code-less licencees (a) really had no interest in HF communications and (b) had never used a CB in their lives obviously escaped them. In fact the class B licencee building 23cm TV gear is a lot closer to the cutting edge than the G3 with his gbp1000 Icom multi-band HF rig.
So like a lot of licencees in the '90s faced with a load of arrogant and rude old gits on one side and the internet just starting to look interesting on the other I just let my licence lapse and turned to my PC.
Amateur radio is a warning to the open source movement, I hope we dont see a load of 60-something OS coders in 30 years time excluding a new generation because they perceive that their patch is being encroached upon.
This may well be true,when I said that I was thinking of the non tidal Thames, i.e. above Teddington, not thinking that the tidal section might have different rules.
With the UK.gov's war on motorists how long do you think it would be before they had a low speed limit and revenue cameras on every bridge?
I cant deny that it's a really cool piece of kit and I hope the 150k price isnt so eye-watering that the company goes titsup before they've shifted a unit, but the idea of using it for high speed commuting on the Thames is a non starter.
I have run a boat on the Thames for some years now and like all other boats on that river it has to obey the speed limit, a stately 4.8 MPH.
I dont think the early Nintendo consoles were ever sold in the UK under the "Famicom" brand. As I remember the 8 bit Famicom was sold as the "Nintendo control deck" and the Super Famicom was just sold as the "Super Nintendo Entertainment System", or SNES. So it seems our Scottish vandals are collectors of exotic retro imports.
This looks to me like a classic UK government tactic, to scare us with something nasty to get through something which would otherwise be controversial. Did the BBC TV series Yes Minister get to the USA? Watch it and learn.
They expect us to make a big noise about these black boxes because it is such a nutty idea. But the big noise will take the heat away from something else, perhaps their proposed ID chips in numberplates.
The day they bring this in is the day I emigrate to Canada. But somehow I dont think I'll have to be packing my bags because no govenment, not even this one is so out of touch as to commit electoral suicide in this way.
I'm sure if I went to Microsoft, having built my shiny new nuclear plant, and said "I need an OS to run my reactor safety systems, do you certify Windows for this?", they'd produce a big legal document that said in effect "No!". This has nothing to do with how good or bad their software is or isnt, or even how many holes it has but simple commercial liability. They arent stupid and they wouldnt risk having to pay for a big radioactive hole in the ground. Even if Windows was the most secure and relaible OS in the universe, they probably still wouldnt.
So why on earth did the designers of the powerplant's safety systems specify Windows in the first place? Perhaps paying for a big radioactive hole in the ground is all in a day's work for them.
The residents of the US are lucky that the plant was shut down and there was aparently a backup system, but that was too close for comfort.
Top marks to the writer of this article for emphasising the community aspect of multiplayer gaming.
I find myself in a dificult position wrt this issue though because I have experienced negative effects from gaming myself. I used to play motor racing games. A lot. But then I stopped playing motor racing games because I found that my driving was becoming more agressive.
I drove faster, I braked later and took more risks. Quite simply, playing TOCA 2 in glorious high resolution with force feedback wheel and pedals was too close to the real sensation of driving my car on twisty British roads for comfort. I was driving like an idiot and if I'd kept at it I'd have killed someone. When I stopped playing racing games and hung up my force feedback wheel my driving improved.
I've played first person shooters both alone and on LANs since Doom came out back in the early '90s. By the same logic as above I should be a crazed killer by now. But I'm not. Unlike driving a car which I do every day, I've never had to clear out a Martian ore plant of aliens armed only with a chainsaw.
I sometimes wish that the critics could recognise that games are just another recreational activity with all the pros and cons that brings. After all, I dont hear them wanting to ban fencing and they use SWORDS ferchrissakes!!
I wish I could lay my hands on some of the magazines from the time. As I remember the other memorable hype was that they had attracted Matsushita{Panasonic) as a backer and the idea was that with such a big backer everyone would have to bow down before them.
At the time I was working for a multimedia encyclopedia publisher so I saw more of the "educational" consoles like the CD-i and CD-TV, but as I remember one of the other 3DO selling points was that they had an accessable game licencing policy unlike those of Sega or Nintendo who required developers to buy a million plastic bricks.
I remember some of the hype surrounding both the original 3DO and this piece of kit. Looking back at it all it amazes me that they managed to get a lot of people all excited about their products not once but twice! How on earth did their hype merchants do that!
I remember people spreading doom and gloom in the Amiga world before the original 3DO came out, aparently it was going to kill all other formats or something:) As if Commodore needed any help killing the Amiga.
Still, it is interesting to see that this particular piece of vapourware made it out in some form. Another "What if..." of computer gaming history sees the light of day once more.
There once was a (hypothetical, of course) game that suffered from appaling bugs. The word in the industry at the time was that the software publishers decided to bring the release forward without telling the developers, i.e. before the product had passed testing and been cleared for release.
It was alleged that some numpty at the publishers, in the absence of any final release disks from the developers, sent out a load of late alpha and beta disks to the replicators to be included in the finished product.
The developers then had a hell of a time producing patches for the released game because there were several different releases out there all with subtly different codebases and bugs.
If I were asked to name the worst game I ever played it would have to be Banzai Bug. I have a special reason to comment on the awfulness of this game because running the helpdesk for the publisher I not only had to play it rather a lot but I saw some of the management decisions that led to the awful state of the released product.
There are certain projects with little real substance but well crafted gloss that cruise the games industry waiting for gullible publishers to snap them up believing them to be "the next (insert name of gaming fad of the time here, Lemmings, Tomb Raider, Quake etc)". Such was Banzai Bug, a 3d game where you had to fly an insect through a series of adventures to escape an exterminator. It could probably have been made quite good with the right publisher, but sadly with a publishing company run by marketeers with little game playing experience that wasnt going to happen.
They signed it in the first place on the basis of an intro video, they were very proud of the fact that they'd had some input on the gameplay despite their games testers telling them it was very poor, and to cap it all when it was finally released they tried to market it as a flight simulator because you were flying the insect character. Naturally this went down well with the flight sim crowd:)
So dont necessarily blame the developers if a game turns out to be a turkey. They will almost certainly know it's a turkey and won't be able to do much about it. Responsibility rests squarely on the publishing company who, blinded by marketeer's self-belief, almost certainly made it that way all by themselves.
You are dead right, 802.11 will become ubiquitous and thus will provide stiff competition for technologies like bluetooth.
What sets this technology apart from the bluetooth/802.11 arena though is that it is not a technology quite like bluetooth so it isn't competing in quite the same marketplace. Instead it seems to offer a low data rate and duty cycle, likely to be targeted at rather lower tech applications.
The chances are most of the devices that have it installed wont even say so on the pack. If you buy a cheap wireless device, say a wireless thermometer, nowadays it will have a pretty dumb 418(?)MHz wireless link. That's the kind of application they are likely to aim at, not the fancy stuff.
What's this hook with a worm on it that seems to have caught in my mouth?
I don't think this technology will be seen off by 802.11 because it is pitching at a fundamentally different application and marketplace to that of Bluetooth.
Reading some of the stuff on the site as I understand it thay are aiming it as much at industrial applications as the kind of wireless netwiorking applications we'd think of. In that context I'd say it would be more analagous to an I2C serial bus for low speed communications than the ethernet you'd use 802.11 for.
You wouldnt use ZigBee(where on earth did they dream that name up?) for a WLAN roll-out but would you use 802.11 for a mouse or an RF keyfob for your car?
Slashdot Mirror
At the time the amateur radio community in the UK was run mostly by people who got their G3 licences in the 1950s and spent most of their time sitting on 80M(3.5MHz) talking about their gardens and what they did in tne war. These people were anti anything that they percieved to threaten the way amateur radio had been for them all those years ago (73 OM and all that) and the morse test was a key(sorry:) bastion of their defence against what they saw as an advance of CB-ers into 'their' patch. The fact that most of the code-less licencees (a) really had no interest in HF communications and (b) had never used a CB in their lives obviously escaped them. In fact the class B licencee building 23cm TV gear is a lot closer to the cutting edge than the G3 with his gbp1000 Icom multi-band HF rig.
So like a lot of licencees in the '90s faced with a load of arrogant and rude old gits on one side and the internet just starting to look interesting on the other I just let my licence lapse and turned to my PC.
Amateur radio is a warning to the open source movement, I hope we dont see a load of 60-something OS coders in 30 years time excluding a new generation because they perceive that their patch is being encroached upon.
With the UK.gov's war on motorists how long do you think it would be before they had a low speed limit and revenue cameras on every bridge?
I have run a boat on the Thames for some years now and like all other boats on that river it has to obey the speed limit, a stately 4.8 MPH.
One for the marina in Monaco methinks.
I dont think the early Nintendo consoles were ever sold in the UK under the "Famicom" brand. As I remember the 8 bit Famicom was sold as the "Nintendo control deck" and the Super Famicom was just sold as the "Super Nintendo Entertainment System", or SNES. So it seems our Scottish vandals are collectors of exotic retro imports.
They expect us to make a big noise about these black boxes because it is such a nutty idea. But the big noise will take the heat away from something else, perhaps their proposed ID chips in numberplates.
The day they bring this in is the day I emigrate to Canada. But somehow I dont think I'll have to be packing my bags because no govenment, not even this one is so out of touch as to commit electoral suicide in this way.
So why on earth did the designers of the powerplant's safety systems specify Windows in the first place? Perhaps paying for a big radioactive hole in the ground is all in a day's work for them.
The residents of the US are lucky that the plant was shut down and there was aparently a backup system, but that was too close for comfort.
I find myself in a dificult position wrt this issue though because I have experienced negative effects from gaming myself. I used to play motor racing games. A lot. But then I stopped playing motor racing games because I found that my driving was becoming more agressive.
I drove faster, I braked later and took more risks. Quite simply, playing TOCA 2 in glorious high resolution with force feedback wheel and pedals was too close to the real sensation of driving my car on twisty British roads for comfort. I was driving like an idiot and if I'd kept at it I'd have killed someone. When I stopped playing racing games and hung up my force feedback wheel my driving improved.
I've played first person shooters both alone and on LANs since Doom came out back in the early '90s. By the same logic as above I should be a crazed killer by now. But I'm not. Unlike driving a car which I do every day, I've never had to clear out a Martian ore plant of aliens armed only with a chainsaw.
I sometimes wish that the critics could recognise that games are just another recreational activity with all the pros and cons that brings. After all, I dont hear them wanting to ban fencing and they use SWORDS ferchrissakes!!
At the time I was working for a multimedia encyclopedia publisher so I saw more of the "educational" consoles like the CD-i and CD-TV, but as I remember one of the other 3DO selling points was that they had an accessable game licencing policy unlike those of Sega or Nintendo who required developers to buy a million plastic bricks.
I remember people spreading doom and gloom in the Amiga world before the original 3DO came out, aparently it was going to kill all other formats or something:) As if Commodore needed any help killing the Amiga.
Still, it is interesting to see that this particular piece of vapourware made it out in some form. Another "What if..." of computer gaming history sees the light of day once more.
There once was a (hypothetical, of course) game that suffered from appaling bugs. The word in the industry at the time was that the software publishers decided to bring the release forward without telling the developers, i.e. before the product had passed testing and been cleared for release.
It was alleged that some numpty at the publishers, in the absence of any final release disks from the developers, sent out a load of late alpha and beta disks to the replicators to be included in the finished product.
The developers then had a hell of a time producing patches for the released game because there were several different releases out there all with subtly different codebases and bugs.
There are certain projects with little real substance but well crafted gloss that cruise the games industry waiting for gullible publishers to snap them up believing them to be "the next (insert name of gaming fad of the time here, Lemmings, Tomb Raider, Quake etc)". Such was Banzai Bug, a 3d game where you had to fly an insect through a series of adventures to escape an exterminator. It could probably have been made quite good with the right publisher, but sadly with a publishing company run by marketeers with little game playing experience that wasnt going to happen.
They signed it in the first place on the basis of an intro video, they were very proud of the fact that they'd had some input on the gameplay despite their games testers telling them it was very poor, and to cap it all when it was finally released they tried to market it as a flight simulator because you were flying the insect character. Naturally this went down well with the flight sim crowd:)
So dont necessarily blame the developers if a game turns out to be a turkey. They will almost certainly know it's a turkey and won't be able to do much about it. Responsibility rests squarely on the publishing company who, blinded by marketeer's self-belief, almost certainly made it that way all by themselves.
What sets this technology apart from the bluetooth/802.11 arena though is that it is not a technology quite like bluetooth so it isn't competing in quite the same marketplace. Instead it seems to offer a low data rate and duty cycle, likely to be targeted at rather lower tech applications.
The chances are most of the devices that have it installed wont even say so on the pack. If you buy a cheap wireless device, say a wireless thermometer, nowadays it will have a pretty dumb 418(?)MHz wireless link. That's the kind of application they are likely to aim at, not the fancy stuff.
What's this hook with a worm on it that seems to have caught in my mouth?
Reading some of the stuff on the site as I understand it thay are aiming it as much at industrial applications as the kind of wireless netwiorking applications we'd think of. In that context I'd say it would be more analagous to an I2C serial bus for low speed communications than the ethernet you'd use 802.11 for.
You wouldnt use ZigBee(where on earth did they dream that name up?) for a WLAN roll-out but would you use 802.11 for a mouse or an RF keyfob for your car?