a) Even if the average bandwidth is low, the attacker will still need the ability to burst those peaks. Remember that in most cases, we pay for peak bandwidth and not average bandwidth. A 56k modem likely won't be able to perform one of these DoS attacks because it doesn't have the peak b/w capability.
b) The more hops you are away from your target, the more your peaks will get spread out and averaged. Keep in mind that most cable modem head-ends and the cable modems themselves have REALLY long packet queues. This is why upstream saturation is such a problem for cable modems. You can burst all you want, if you're DoSing from a cable modem it'll be averaged out and/or the timing completely FUBARed by the time the packets leave your neighborhood.
" You're asking a group of people, many of whom are "'pros' with the MCSEs and so on""
You don't seem to understand the Slashdot crowd.
Most people here consider MCSE cert to not be worth the paper it's printed on. Most consider people with no qualifications beyond an MCSE cert to be clueless neanderthals.
I would personally be more willing to trust a 16-year-old with some PC experience than the average dimwitted MCSE.
Dell laptops are typically some of the most upgradable PC-based laptops out there. (Although it's an increasing trend in upgradability in general.)
The Dell Inspiron 8000 series allowed upgrades to: CPU (socketed) Video card (Socketed in a special package) RAM (SODIMMS like everyone else) HD Optical drives
They had multiple display options, but that was something you could only choose at purchase time.
Compatible laptops in the C-series 8000s were the 8000, the 8100, and 8200. A very common upgrade (which made Slashdot) was to upgrade an I8000's GeForce 2 Go to the GeForce 4 440 Go (GF4 440MX) from the 8200. You could also buy socketed P4-M processors to upgrade the 8200. I've heard rumors that the "Precision" variant of the I8000 had a Quadro option that was the equivalent of a GeForce 4 4200 Go (i.e. a Ti4200), so the 8x00s might be upgradable to GF4Ti specs.
The new 8500 is not socket-compatible with the previous 8000s, neither is it media-bay compatible. The CPU socket might be the same, the video cards are a new form factor though. It will probably be upgradable with parts from one or two successor generations, like the 8000 could accept many parts designed for the 8100 and 8200.
Well, the problem in your case was that you were using an early generation drive. The average CD-R drive sucked until the era of 4x CD-R drives. (Back when the Panasonic/Matsushita CW-7502B came out, people soon regarded it as one of the most reliable CD-R drives out there. So far with the exception of massive media damage, everything burned at 4x in my old 7502 is still working well.)
Back in the days when CD-R was new and 2x was blazingly fast, CD-R recording was even more of a crapshoot than DVD recording is now.
Things are different. 4x on a modern drive capable of 48x is going to be FAR more reliable than 1x on an crappy early-gen drive that was only specced at 2x. CD recording is a mature technology now. It will (of course) depend on the drive you use. 4x in a recent Lite-On or Plextor should last forever for you.
My first CD-R drive was a Panasonic CW-7502B - 4x8 -R only.
I have NEVEr had a corrupt burn with it and much of the media burned with that drive is still working today.
On the other hand, stuff I burned at 32-48x in my LiteOn is a crapshoot - I have a number of HP-branded discs that are beginning to die after 2 years. It can be partially blamed on the storage, I was using a CD case that wound up leaving deposits on the disc.:(
I'm pretty sure Ricoh is Japanese, and is one of the better media manufacturers.
Japanese manufacturers: MCC (Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.) - Verbatim discs used to be MCC. They are now CMC Mag (see below) Taiyo Yuden (I believe) Maxell - Beware of counterfeit Maxell media Sony TDK - Their "Armor Plated" DVDs are regarded as the best DVD-R media in existence. Of course, it is also the most expensive... Even more expensive than Pioneer-branded media. A few others
Taiwanese manufacturers: CMC Magnetics (suck) - Can be found as KHypermedia, OptimumDisc, Memorex, and now Verbatim (i.e. Verbatim used to sell great media, but I would avoid them from now on.) Princo (ultra-suck) Ritek (Best of the Taiwanese manufacturers, rivaling the Japanese for quality. Riteks are the best "bang for your buck" for DVD-Rs.) Optodisc (ultra-suck, at least their DVD-RW discs)
Those people are incredibly conservative when it comes to safety.
It seems to be an assumption in Boeing design: If it CAN fail, it will fail completely. Therefore, make sure it can't bring down the jet if it does fail. You probably know that the flight control computers on most passenger jets are triply redundant or more - Did you know that each of the 2-3 backups for a jet's flight control computer are made by different manufacturers with software developed independently?
IIRC, the astronauts have units with manuevering thrusters that allow them to move at will near the Shuttle. They simply could have moved below the wing.
Worst case scenario - Let someone out on a tether, give it some slack, gently fire the thrusters in a way that causes the shuttle to flip over slowly. No need to manuever below the wing when you can flip the wing over.
While I can't say how a lone transistor from a Pentium would behave (Transistors for digital logic are designed for on/off switching, RF transistors are usually designed for linear amplification. Note that 81 GHz is not the switching speed of the aforementioned transistor - It isn't anywhere CLOSE to any form of switching operation, it's almost surely amplifying an 81 GHz sine wave. For switching operation, you'd have frequencies present at harmonics (multiples) of 81 GHz.
But a general idea: For single RF transistors, silicon can easily go up to 10 GHz, possibly even 20+. This does involve changes in the layout of the transistor that optimize it for RF amplification rather than digital switching.
A big issue in CPU design is not the actual speeds of the transistors, but delays due to the fact that each transistor gate has a capacitance. The more inputs a logic gate's output feeds, the slower it will switch. Fanout is a killer in digital circuitry - And is the number one reason why memory speeds are so slow, because those address lines have LOTS of transistors connected to them.
Semiconductor technologies that are economical for single RF transistors can often be unsuitable to large-scale digital designs, either due to the properties of the transistor being unsuitable for switching rather than linear amplification, or due to manufacturing concerns.
Two words: Gallium Arsenide. GaAs is *BIG* in the RF transistor world these days. But it's still not economical for CPUs due to manufacturing issues.
"Please point me to any "scientific" evidence that tubes are superior."
I don't know about audio amps (and don't really care), but in the RF transmitter field, tubes can tolerate load mismatch (SWR) conditions that no transistor amplifier could survive.
In addition, specialty variants of RF vacuum tubes can function in situations not possible with a transistor. (For example, travelling wave tubes are the only easy way to develop serious power in the microwave frequencies, and no one can beat a magnetron for a cheap and simple CW microwave source - You have vacuum tubes to thank every time you cook food in a microwave oven.)
Honestly, the efficiencies of a tube amp vs. a silicon-based amp won't be much different.
But for high-power amplifiers, tubes are much cheaper. The border is somewhere in the kilowatt range. Once you hit 20 KW, tubes are the only way to go unless you have SERIOUS amounts of cash to spend. Tubes are also easier to heatsink, and more durable in certain situations. (While they have some natural failure modes that transistors don't, such as filament burnout, tube amplifiers can tolerate certain conditions that would fry a transistor amp such as a highly mismatched load reflecting a significant portion of power back to the amplifier.)
Also, in the microwave regions, some tubes can develop gain where transistors were unusable until recently. Some of AT&T's first communications satellites used TWT (travelling wave tube) amplifiers because it was just not possible at the time to amplify a microwave signal at any decent power level using transistors.
Also, one thing to note about this article: They got a single transistor amplifying an RF signal at 81 GHz. Given that current transistor technologies were amplifying 10 GHz+ signals long before CPUs reached 1 GHz, don't expect to see 80 GHz CPUs any time soon. Expect maybe a 100-200% increase in clock speed over silicon at best, given other claims made in the article about this working up to about twice the frequency of existing technologies. (Note that they are probably referring to GaAs instead of Si in that case, which is why I say 100-200% rather than 50-100%)
The big benefit to diamond will not be with clock speed, but with the ability to fit more transistors on a chip w/o melting down.
"Actually, improvements like pipelining don't affect the maximum clock frequency of a microprocessor (the GHz thing) very much. What they do improve is the average ammount of processing work that can be done per-clock-cycle."
A 20-stage pipeline is one of the many reasons that the P4 runs SLOWER clock cycle-for-clock cycle than its predecessor or the Athlon.
A 3 GHz P3 will trounce a 3 GHz P4. But because of its design, the P3 can't scale very far beyond 1 GHz. The P4, on the other hand, still has lots of room to grow.
This sort of thing is one of CCP's goals with EVE Online - They have a storyline with various events planned to (apparently) 2+ years out from now.
Things are kind of light on the content/events side at the moment since CCP is working on fleshing out lots of post-release bugs, but as the game shapes up and gets more stable, CCP has started kicking off occasional events and content, which should start becoming more frequent over the next months.
These studies have existed for 2-3 years or more at this point.
A number of other studies have indicated that any form of alcohol (in moderation) can serve to reduce the risk of heart disease. Red wine may have additional benefits, but white wine and even beer have shown to be beneficial if consumed in moderation in a number of studies. (Of course, any wine will be better than beer due to the fact that wines typically have more alcohol and less carbohydrates - Beer shoots my bloodsugar up significantly, usually needing a unit of insulin per glass, while wine usually has near-neutral effects on my bloodsugar levels.)
"I give you alot of credit, you see thing really as they are except 900. There is no excuse because hams can override Part 15 devices on the band. Cybikos should be everywhere, yet they are no where except for a few guys who see the light!"
Yeah, we can override them, but overriding QRM means running more power, and more power costs $$$. Considering that hams often push their links to the limits, that means that even though we can legally override part 15 devices in the 900 band, the 900 band is still, well... Useless.
Would you want to run EME on 900 with all that QRM? I wouldn't.
Plus, IIRC, the amateur radio service is a tertiary service in 900 (i.e. there are two other services with priority over us) rather than a secondary service in most other bands. (With the primary service being the military - Fortunately they rarely have a need to use their primary allocations in the ham bands, so for all practical purposes we are the primaries in most bands. 900 is an exception.)
Since MPEG video uses a YUV colorspace which usually contains only one "color" pixel for every four or so "real" pixels. (Luminance is a 1:1 mapping, chrominance is usually 4:1 or so), the bandwidth needed for a 1920x1080i signal is reduced.
It is further reduced with many video cards that perform the IDCT and motion compensation in the video card and not on the host CPU.
That said, with an AGP vid card, even without hardware MoComp and IDCT, a P4-2.5 can (just barely) decode 1080i in realtime. With a card that does hardware IDCT and MoComp (NVidia is basically the only choice for this under Linux, due to deficiencies in ATI's drivers.), the CPU required is even less.
In short: This particular HD solution displays directly to your video card. No passthrough or other hardware tricks needed.
Given that the CSI DVD releases are 4:3 (and a shitty low-bitrate MPEG encoding job to boot), the ONLY way to watch CSI is in its full HD glory.
Yes, CSI is originally filmed in widescreen, and the HDTV film transfer broadcast by CBS (Well, at least on WCBS-DT out of New York City) is absolutely amazing. The DVDs can't even come close to touching it.
So yes, there is some good HD programming on TV. My MyHD card was worth it just for the drool factor of CSI in HD alone...
" Ham radio has reached the "bleeding edge of antiquity" but this fact has escaped the notice of these breast-beating hams too busy to notice that nothing above 450mhz has been used during emergencies, making the spectrum argument a moot one. No 900 trunking, 900 digital nor 900 voice has been deployed in the 26MHz we are allocated. None! Even though 900 equipment is available surplus, no one has the vision to attempt at using that band. This clearly shows how far ham radio has slid behind the pace of cutting edge technology. No wireless data above 9600 baud, now how outdated is that?"
900 is an especially dead band due to the fact that (I believe) amateurs have a rather low-priority assignment there and hence the band basically... Sucks.
I think there's more activity on 1.2 GHz than 900.
We do have wireless data above 9600, but it's insanely rare and the cost is absurd. The status quo for amateur data is 1200 bps AFSK.:(
"Preoccupation with rules & callsign identification shows the true anal-retentive side of the evolved ham radio persona. This crosses over to the internet where the same people demand you ID. I don't have to, there is no rule saying I must! Self importance is not a selling point, it is a hinderance." Admittedly, we do need FCC rules in this regard. But I will admite that amateurs are overly anal-retentive about IDing and callsigns.
Two weeks after getting my license, I made a call on a repeater. I got a reply, "This is only for licensed amateur use, I am shutting this repeater down." *click*. Hmm, not licensed? What's this piece of paper from the FCC here?
I tried again 15 minutes later, and someone else apologized that he had misheard my call as A2YPH (which is indeed invalid.) Rather than asking me to repeat my call in phonetics (which I would readily have done), he simply shut down the repeater. Real nice way to make someone feel welcome in the community.
And as to Phil's comments about hams clinging to the past... All one has to do is look at any code vs. no-code debate on eham.net or qrz.com. For those not familiar with amateur radio, think of combining vi vs. emacs, GNOME vs KDE, and every other "holy war" topic you can think of and rolling it into one debate. Then multiply the severity by ten times. You now have code vs. no-code. (In short, a significant majority of amateurs seem to be insistent on clinging to Morse code, an antiquated relic of the past.)
Backscatter can be used for imagery, in many cases for imagery that transmission X-rays are unsuitable for.
Recall a few months ago a/. article on backscatter X-ray imagery being used to detect weapons at airports/contraband at border checkpoints that transmission X-ray scans would miss.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most common piston engines in general aviation is made by Lycoming.
150 HP
Carbed
Magneto ignition
Requires leaded gas
50-year-old design
Horrendous polluter that runs rough
Cost: Approx $32,000 for a Lycosaurus
Meanwhile, you can get a complete car with a superior engine in all aspects (performance, reliability, smoothness) for under $20,000
Since it requires accurate timing.
a) Even if the average bandwidth is low, the attacker will still need the ability to burst those peaks. Remember that in most cases, we pay for peak bandwidth and not average bandwidth. A 56k modem likely won't be able to perform one of these DoS attacks because it doesn't have the peak b/w capability.
b) The more hops you are away from your target, the more your peaks will get spread out and averaged. Keep in mind that most cable modem head-ends and the cable modems themselves have REALLY long packet queues. This is why upstream saturation is such a problem for cable modems. You can burst all you want, if you're DoSing from a cable modem it'll be averaged out and/or the timing completely FUBARed by the time the packets leave your neighborhood.
" You're asking a group of people, many of whom are "'pros' with the MCSEs and so on""
You don't seem to understand the Slashdot crowd.
Most people here consider MCSE cert to not be worth the paper it's printed on. Most consider people with no qualifications beyond an MCSE cert to be clueless neanderthals.
I would personally be more willing to trust a 16-year-old with some PC experience than the average dimwitted MCSE.
Dell laptops are typically some of the most upgradable PC-based laptops out there. (Although it's an increasing trend in upgradability in general.)
The Dell Inspiron 8000 series allowed upgrades to:
CPU (socketed)
Video card (Socketed in a special package)
RAM (SODIMMS like everyone else)
HD
Optical drives
They had multiple display options, but that was something you could only choose at purchase time.
Compatible laptops in the C-series 8000s were the 8000, the 8100, and 8200. A very common upgrade (which made Slashdot) was to upgrade an I8000's GeForce 2 Go to the GeForce 4 440 Go (GF4 440MX) from the 8200. You could also buy socketed P4-M processors to upgrade the 8200. I've heard rumors that the "Precision" variant of the I8000 had a Quadro option that was the equivalent of a GeForce 4 4200 Go (i.e. a Ti4200), so the 8x00s might be upgradable to GF4Ti specs.
The new 8500 is not socket-compatible with the previous 8000s, neither is it media-bay compatible. The CPU socket might be the same, the video cards are a new form factor though. It will probably be upgradable with parts from one or two successor generations, like the 8000 could accept many parts designed for the 8100 and 8200.
Graduate school is always an option.
This is what I'm planning on doing - I'm starting part-time classes next week, and likely going fulltime next semester.
Well, the problem in your case was that you were using an early generation drive. The average CD-R drive sucked until the era of 4x CD-R drives. (Back when the Panasonic/Matsushita CW-7502B came out, people soon regarded it as one of the most reliable CD-R drives out there. So far with the exception of massive media damage, everything burned at 4x in my old 7502 is still working well.)
Back in the days when CD-R was new and 2x was blazingly fast, CD-R recording was even more of a crapshoot than DVD recording is now.
Things are different. 4x on a modern drive capable of 48x is going to be FAR more reliable than 1x on an crappy early-gen drive that was only specced at 2x. CD recording is a mature technology now. It will (of course) depend on the drive you use. 4x in a recent Lite-On or Plextor should last forever for you.
My first CD-R drive was a Panasonic CW-7502B - 4x8 -R only.
:(
I have NEVEr had a corrupt burn with it and much of the media burned with that drive is still working today.
On the other hand, stuff I burned at 32-48x in my LiteOn is a crapshoot - I have a number of HP-branded discs that are beginning to die after 2 years. It can be partially blamed on the storage, I was using a CD case that wound up leaving deposits on the disc.
I'm pretty sure Ricoh is Japanese, and is one of the better media manufacturers.
Japanese manufacturers:
MCC (Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.) - Verbatim discs used to be MCC. They are now CMC Mag (see below)
Taiyo Yuden
(I believe) Maxell - Beware of counterfeit Maxell media
Sony
TDK - Their "Armor Plated" DVDs are regarded as the best DVD-R media in existence. Of course, it is also the most expensive... Even more expensive than Pioneer-branded media.
A few others
Taiwanese manufacturers:
CMC Magnetics (suck) - Can be found as KHypermedia, OptimumDisc, Memorex, and now Verbatim (i.e. Verbatim used to sell great media, but I would avoid them from now on.)
Princo (ultra-suck)
Ritek (Best of the Taiwanese manufacturers, rivaling the Japanese for quality. Riteks are the best "bang for your buck" for DVD-Rs.)
Optodisc (ultra-suck, at least their DVD-RW discs)
A story about government research gone horribly wrong, releasing a new terror upon the world.
"The Return of Clippy"
Opens October 13.
Those people are incredibly conservative when it comes to safety.
It seems to be an assumption in Boeing design: If it CAN fail, it will fail completely. Therefore, make sure it can't bring down the jet if it does fail. You probably know that the flight control computers on most passenger jets are triply redundant or more - Did you know that each of the 2-3 backups for a jet's flight control computer are made by different manufacturers with software developed independently?
IIRC, the astronauts have units with manuevering thrusters that allow them to move at will near the Shuttle. They simply could have moved below the wing.
Worst case scenario - Let someone out on a tether, give it some slack, gently fire the thrusters in a way that causes the shuttle to flip over slowly. No need to manuever below the wing when you can flip the wing over.
While I can't say how a lone transistor from a Pentium would behave (Transistors for digital logic are designed for on/off switching, RF transistors are usually designed for linear amplification. Note that 81 GHz is not the switching speed of the aforementioned transistor - It isn't anywhere CLOSE to any form of switching operation, it's almost surely amplifying an 81 GHz sine wave. For switching operation, you'd have frequencies present at harmonics (multiples) of 81 GHz.
But a general idea: For single RF transistors, silicon can easily go up to 10 GHz, possibly even 20+. This does involve changes in the layout of the transistor that optimize it for RF amplification rather than digital switching.
A big issue in CPU design is not the actual speeds of the transistors, but delays due to the fact that each transistor gate has a capacitance. The more inputs a logic gate's output feeds, the slower it will switch. Fanout is a killer in digital circuitry - And is the number one reason why memory speeds are so slow, because those address lines have LOTS of transistors connected to them.
Semiconductor technologies that are economical for single RF transistors can often be unsuitable to large-scale digital designs, either due to the properties of the transistor being unsuitable for switching rather than linear amplification, or due to manufacturing concerns.
Two words: Gallium Arsenide. GaAs is *BIG* in the RF transistor world these days. But it's still not economical for CPUs due to manufacturing issues.
"Please point me to any "scientific" evidence that tubes are superior."
I don't know about audio amps (and don't really care), but in the RF transmitter field, tubes can tolerate load mismatch (SWR) conditions that no transistor amplifier could survive.
In addition, specialty variants of RF vacuum tubes can function in situations not possible with a transistor. (For example, travelling wave tubes are the only easy way to develop serious power in the microwave frequencies, and no one can beat a magnetron for a cheap and simple CW microwave source - You have vacuum tubes to thank every time you cook food in a microwave oven.)
Honestly, the efficiencies of a tube amp vs. a silicon-based amp won't be much different.
But for high-power amplifiers, tubes are much cheaper. The border is somewhere in the kilowatt range. Once you hit 20 KW, tubes are the only way to go unless you have SERIOUS amounts of cash to spend. Tubes are also easier to heatsink, and more durable in certain situations. (While they have some natural failure modes that transistors don't, such as filament burnout, tube amplifiers can tolerate certain conditions that would fry a transistor amp such as a highly mismatched load reflecting a significant portion of power back to the amplifier.)
Also, in the microwave regions, some tubes can develop gain where transistors were unusable until recently. Some of AT&T's first communications satellites used TWT (travelling wave tube) amplifiers because it was just not possible at the time to amplify a microwave signal at any decent power level using transistors.
Also, one thing to note about this article: They got a single transistor amplifying an RF signal at 81 GHz. Given that current transistor technologies were amplifying 10 GHz+ signals long before CPUs reached 1 GHz, don't expect to see 80 GHz CPUs any time soon. Expect maybe a 100-200% increase in clock speed over silicon at best, given other claims made in the article about this working up to about twice the frequency of existing technologies. (Note that they are probably referring to GaAs instead of Si in that case, which is why I say 100-200% rather than 50-100%)
The big benefit to diamond will not be with clock speed, but with the ability to fit more transistors on a chip w/o melting down.
"Actually, improvements like pipelining don't affect the maximum clock frequency of a microprocessor (the GHz thing) very much. What they do improve is the average ammount of processing work that can be done per-clock-cycle."
A 20-stage pipeline is one of the many reasons that the P4 runs SLOWER clock cycle-for-clock cycle than its predecessor or the Athlon.
A 3 GHz P3 will trounce a 3 GHz P4. But because of its design, the P3 can't scale very far beyond 1 GHz. The P4, on the other hand, still has lots of room to grow.
This sort of thing is one of CCP's goals with EVE Online - They have a storyline with various events planned to (apparently) 2+ years out from now.
Things are kind of light on the content/events side at the moment since CCP is working on fleshing out lots of post-release bugs, but as the game shapes up and gets more stable, CCP has started kicking off occasional events and content, which should start becoming more frequent over the next months.
These studies have existed for 2-3 years or more at this point.
A number of other studies have indicated that any form of alcohol (in moderation) can serve to reduce the risk of heart disease. Red wine may have additional benefits, but white wine and even beer have shown to be beneficial if consumed in moderation in a number of studies. (Of course, any wine will be better than beer due to the fact that wines typically have more alcohol and less carbohydrates - Beer shoots my bloodsugar up significantly, usually needing a unit of insulin per glass, while wine usually has near-neutral effects on my bloodsugar levels.)
"I give you alot of credit, you see thing really as they are except 900. There is no excuse because hams can override Part 15 devices on the band. Cybikos should be everywhere, yet they are no where except for a few guys who see the light!"
Yeah, we can override them, but overriding QRM means running more power, and more power costs $$$. Considering that hams often push their links to the limits, that means that even though we can legally override part 15 devices in the 900 band, the 900 band is still, well... Useless.
Would you want to run EME on 900 with all that QRM? I wouldn't.
Plus, IIRC, the amateur radio service is a tertiary service in 900 (i.e. there are two other services with priority over us) rather than a secondary service in most other bands. (With the primary service being the military - Fortunately they rarely have a need to use their primary allocations in the ham bands, so for all practical purposes we are the primaries in most bands. 900 is an exception.)
Since MPEG video uses a YUV colorspace which usually contains only one "color" pixel for every four or so "real" pixels. (Luminance is a 1:1 mapping, chrominance is usually 4:1 or so), the bandwidth needed for a 1920x1080i signal is reduced.
It is further reduced with many video cards that perform the IDCT and motion compensation in the video card and not on the host CPU.
That said, with an AGP vid card, even without hardware MoComp and IDCT, a P4-2.5 can (just barely) decode 1080i in realtime. With a card that does hardware IDCT and MoComp (NVidia is basically the only choice for this under Linux, due to deficiencies in ATI's drivers.), the CPU required is even less.
In short: This particular HD solution displays directly to your video card. No passthrough or other hardware tricks needed.
Given that the CSI DVD releases are 4:3 (and a shitty low-bitrate MPEG encoding job to boot), the ONLY way to watch CSI is in its full HD glory.
Yes, CSI is originally filmed in widescreen, and the HDTV film transfer broadcast by CBS (Well, at least on WCBS-DT out of New York City) is absolutely amazing. The DVDs can't even come close to touching it.
So yes, there is some good HD programming on TV. My MyHD card was worth it just for the drool factor of CSI in HD alone...
" Ham radio has reached the "bleeding edge of antiquity" but this fact has escaped the notice of these breast-beating hams too busy to notice that nothing above 450mhz has been used during emergencies, making the spectrum argument a moot one. No 900 trunking, 900 digital nor 900 voice has been deployed in the 26MHz we are allocated. None! Even though 900 equipment is available surplus, no one has the vision to attempt at using that band. This clearly shows how far ham radio has slid behind the pace of cutting edge technology. No wireless data above 9600 baud, now how outdated is that?"
:(
900 is an especially dead band due to the fact that (I believe) amateurs have a rather low-priority assignment there and hence the band basically... Sucks.
I think there's more activity on 1.2 GHz than 900.
We do have wireless data above 9600, but it's insanely rare and the cost is absurd. The status quo for amateur data is 1200 bps AFSK.
"Preoccupation with rules & callsign identification shows the true anal-retentive side of the evolved ham radio persona. This crosses over to the internet where the same people demand you ID. I don't have to, there is no rule saying I must! Self importance is not a selling point, it is a hinderance."
Admittedly, we do need FCC rules in this regard. But I will admite that amateurs are overly anal-retentive about IDing and callsigns.
Two weeks after getting my license, I made a call on a repeater. I got a reply, "This is only for licensed amateur use, I am shutting this repeater down." *click*. Hmm, not licensed? What's this piece of paper from the FCC here?
I tried again 15 minutes later, and someone else apologized that he had misheard my call as A2YPH (which is indeed invalid.) Rather than asking me to repeat my call in phonetics (which I would readily have done), he simply shut down the repeater. Real nice way to make someone feel welcome in the community.
And as to Phil's comments about hams clinging to the past... All one has to do is look at any code vs. no-code debate on eham.net or qrz.com. For those not familiar with amateur radio, think of combining vi vs. emacs, GNOME vs KDE, and every other "holy war" topic you can think of and rolling it into one debate. Then multiply the severity by ten times. You now have code vs. no-code. (In short, a significant majority of amateurs seem to be insistent on clinging to Morse code, an antiquated relic of the past.)
Andy Dodd, N2YPH
Backscatter can be used for imagery, in many cases for imagery that transmission X-rays are unsuitable for.
/. article on backscatter X-ray imagery being used to detect weapons at airports/contraband at border checkpoints that transmission X-ray scans would miss.
Recall a few months ago a
Super-high-res projector capable of 3000+ lumens - $20k+ most likely.
"OK" projector, maybe 720p-capable, 1200 lumens - $5-6k, maybe less.
Curtains: $100 or less.
So I can either spent $15000 overcoming lights in the room, or I can spend $100 and install some fucking curtains.
Real tough decision there.
Movies were meant to be watched with the lights turned off.
My projector is only rated 600 lumens and I love it.