If you do some research, the FCC was VERY close to legalizing low power FM stations, but then the measure just quietly died.
No it didn't. Things may not have turned out as some envisioned, but it happened. Due to interference issues, most of the available allocations were outside of major metropolitan areas. IIRC correctly, licenses were generally being granted to established non-profits. Religious broadcasters really moved in on that more than anyone it seems. They were ready too.
If you'd like to see what's out there now, do an FCC FM Database search. For starters leave the fields blank, but for the popup menu choice under "Service:" Pick "Low Power FM FL", then a ways down the page hit the "Submit Data" button. That'll bring up 1000 or so entries. Those with LIC after the frequency are licensed. CP means construction permit. APP means application. MOD means modification (usually altered plans in a construction permit) Check out the names of the licensees...
There's quite a bit of low-power TV around too.
Regulation is essential from a technical standpoint. The main area I have issues with is who gets the licenses and what their responsibilities are. Unfortunately major consolidation has been allowed in broadcasting. I would have liked to have seen the opposite where a large percentage of stations would have to be owned by licensees living in the coverage area. All should be functioning as trustees of the public interest. The impact of media is huge on the functioning of Democracy, education, our economy and so many social issues. The deregulation that brought consolidation, infomercials, and anything for a buck has done great damage. Even those that don't see the deeper issues have likely noticed many more commercials than years ago, and a serious decline in the quality of programming.
Considering that selling influence to raise money for campaigns is one of the bigger components of our political corruption, we should look at ways of cutting the ad dollars to broadcasters. Stations should be required to provide free political public affairs time to candidates, and interested members of their community of license. Diversity in station ownership would help insure that a good cross section of views are presented.
The wrong regulations, or corruption in the process, have serious repercussions in the media just as we've seen with telephony/ISPs, food safety, banking, health care....
We need FCC regulation, but to serve the public, not broadcasters. Positions in the FCC are by appointment. Keep that in mind when voting for those that make the appointments.
Whoops.. where I defined EIRP rating, I actually was describing antenna gain (actually 10 * log of the ratio (power needed into isotropic to match directional / power fed into directional) the units are dbi. Transmit power in dbm (db compared to a milliwatt) + antenna gain dbi = EIRP
dB are a log ratio always comparing something to a reference level. The nice thing about describing it all with logs of ratios is having the end calculations with power, gain and loss become simple adding and subtracting instead of multiplying.
(I should know better than to write when falling asleep...)
The reference is an isotropic radiator... like having a point source radiating energy equally in ALL directions (up and down as well as the horizontal plane. A vertically oriented half-wavelength dipole has 2.15 dB gain over an isotropic radiator. If vertical, it radiates equally in all directions horizontally, but drops to nothing straight up and straight down. Many have used a dipole as an alternate reference since it the lowest gain and most basic antenna normally constructed. The EIRP rating is basically the amount of power it would take fed into an isotropic antenna to equal the signal produced from the gain (focusing effect) of a directional antenna. Some get confused by antenna gain. It doesn't give us more power than a transmitter puts out, it just concentrates the signal in a desired (hopefully!) direction at the expense of other directions.
The FCC rule differ for point to point versus point to multipoint WiFi. Point to multipoint the limit is 4 Watts effective regardless of antenna gain. (36 dBm, m being mw or milliwatts) A 100 mw card (20dbmw) feeding a 16 dBi gain antenna would produce 36 dbmw EIRP if there was no cable loss. If 3 dB was lost, it would take 200 mw into the cable to compensate (23dbm -3dB + 16dBi = 36
Point to multipoint starts at the level for a low gain antenna, but only requires a fairly small reduction in transmitter output power as higher antenna gain is used. So the maximum allowable signal does increase quite a bit with higher gain antennas.
Since things are pretty close to line of sight at 2.4 GHz, a huge dish near the ground (and not pointing up in the sky) isn't likely to do nearly as well as a smaller one up above the clutter. So most C band dishes (usually 2 to 4 meters across) are too big for most situations. Gain is probably best estimated by comparison with commercial dishes of the same diameter and frequency.
Allowable power is likely different in other countries. Your mileage (kilometerage????) may vary
I'm wondering how feasible it would be to provide some added DNS protection at the client end. Most of the computers and consumer routers I've dealt with took entries for three DNS servers (or got them by DHCP). I'm not sure whether all three get queried and the first result used, or the first queried, then the second if there's no response from the first?
Behavior probably varies by OS as this short tale illustrates a bug in Mac OS 9: (back on topic after this...) Years ago I encountered a problem where some Mac OS 9 users using DHCP with Charter were getting "dead browser" behavior. They were not getting any DNS lookup when the first of the three Charter was giving by DHCP was a dead server. The Macs apparently weren't trying or using the results from the other two. Although I'd told Charter about it, the support person didn't apparently didn't think it mattered because I said I had my system running fine by using a different server with the DNS IPs entered manually. On visiting a friend having what he called "no connectivity" ask me to fix his machine, I found the problem was still there over 6 weeks later!! At that point I called support and asked for a supervisor (which got me to someone in tier 2 management), and when I explained what was going on and that it had no doubt been affecting a number of people the response was "Oh shit!".... At last someone understood. Later that day I saw the DHCP server had been reconfigured to list one of the working DNSs twice, deleting the entry for the server that was down...
What I'm wondering now, is couldn't our client machines make better use of multiple DNS servers? I would have hoped they would ping all available occasionally (or just time lookup results), then make the fastest one the default to reduce latency. Many times when I've seen people complaining their system was slow (for web surfing), the problem seemed to be DNS latency rather than one of bandwidth. For the current topic where the trustworthiness of DNS results is the big issue, perhaps there could be a client mode that looks at the DNS results and requires all three, or at least two of three, to agree. That'd be slower, but more secure. Perhaps some sort of alert box could be presented. Or perhaps something (like Apple's software update) could temporarily automatically throw the lookup into a require two or three matched results mode, while normally just using the fastest one? I suppose the fastest could always be used, and then a warning dialog/alert box thrown up if the other servers disagree. Of course it would probably best best if the three servers were unrelated, maybe one from the clients ISP, OpenDNS, and a third somewhere else. An added benefit might be optional detection/blocking of DNS provided ad pages.
Well I think you need to do a little more research first. The resolution isn't sub-par at all. Par would mean normal, median, average, etc. A little research turns up that essentially every 22" desktop monitor is 1680x1050. So the resolution is right on par.
As for LED backlighting, are you kidding me? That is currently very expensive. It's neat and all, but you aren't going to see it outside of either laptops (where the reduction in thickness and power is worth it) or extremely high end displays (where the increase in colour gamut is worth it). At present you need to be willing to drop serious cash to get such a display.
In calling it an HD monitor the expectations some have are different than what they'd be if it were simply marketed as a PC monitor. Quite a bit of HD content, even much over the air HD, is at 1920*1080, so these displays don't show the full detail of common source material. It's true that 1080i/p is generally not seen until one gets to about 24" screens (as found in the Apple iMac for instance). So 1080i/p HD has to be scaled down on this display. 720P mode HD is 1280*720, so that's well supported, but we've been able to get that much detail on some much smaller displays. Even the lower-cost series of Apple's laptops, the 13" MacBook, have supported 1280*800 for about two years now. $400 is still quite a bit of money, especially if one considers the relatively poor support and lifetime for these newer displays/sets. There are many c.r.t monitors and televisions that still work after 20 years. Most of the current generation will probably be junk when the backlight dies after a few years.
While most probably find the detail for video at 720P or so pleasing enough, other specifications that are not clearly shown that may actually impact perceived quality more. There's certainly a problem with some not being adequately revealed to or understood by consumers. I've seen panels that were actually only 6-bits per color instead of the 8 we were used to for many years. Depending on how those are driven, bright areas often look saturated/over-exposed, dark areas get blocky looking. Some of those awful looking dark areas look like something one could easily pass off as compression artifacts, so it can be something of a shock to discover they are due discarded bits of color depth in the display. Some displays get around the insufficient color depth by dithering, but that ads noise/grain. Generally the monitors with lower color depth panels have faster response times, and look great for gaming and general surfing/office use, but they're very disappointing for video. If they're sold for video, we should complain loudly.
In fairness, even some larger very expensive panels in the past fell short in ways some would not expect. Many of the large very costly plasma tv displays were only 1024*768 resolution even though they had a 16:9 aspect ratio (using non-square pixels). Technically they don't even qualify as low-end HD since the minimum is 720p (1280*720). Some of the smaller LCD televisions are really really awful. Considering that consumers generally sit closer to smaller displays (easily occupying as much or more of the field of vision), there's just as great of a need to support the full detail of the content as with a larger one.
I agree that LED backlighting isn't quite here yet for TV use, but LEDs have had a continuing rapid improvements in brightness/efficiency (reminiscent of the speedup seen in CPUs). Seeing an Apple patent for slide in replaceable LED strips suggests that recent generations have had some issue with longevity. Hopefully as LEDs improve, they won't need to be pushed as hard and lifetimes will be better than other backlighting means. Considering the high power consumption of larger screen tv/PC displays, the significant improvement in efficiency LEDs could bring is a big deal. TVs and computers have become a very significant segment of household energy consumption. They really ought to come with stickers showing typical a
But lets not even think about the fine possibilities such as massive damage on the cellular level - just consider the overpressures that could be set up within blood vessels. It will be interesting to see if there is any increase in "massive cerebral hemorrage" as a cause of death going forward.
Kinda makes ya wonder who they tested this on, doesn't it?
Actually you've got the right idea with a tin foil hat. But since the signals may not be coming from the sky, the foil should wrap around as much of your head as possible. Looking through a metal screen or metal full of tiny holes should be effective in blocking signals approaching your face. The holes just have to be small relative to the wavelength of the signal. That should sound familiar since that's what's done in the windows in doors of microwave ovens.
Since the microwaves are in very short pulses the average power level apparently isn't high enough to cook you. If the only effect is to hear something, it could be ineffective if one knows to simply ignore it.
How's this for an awful thought?.... send auditory spam to people via these microwaves...
I can see it now, crowds holding up shields to bounce signals back at their attackers
I was staying outside of LA in a high rise hotel a few years ago, and you could see the buildings of LA on the horizon, and they looked like they were covered by a slightly yellow dome of smog. It was very discernible, and seemed to have a solid line differentiating it from the clear air above.
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer
When dealing with a company that is generally not responsive to customer feedback, the only thing that they're likely to pay much attention to is lost business. If subscribers cancel their accounts and tell them why they are canceling that may be noticed. Those who can't cut the cord with them completely (due to lack of competing options) might still be able to reduce the customer count by arranging for neighbors to share connections via WiFi etc.
If they are selling advertising and there is a way to tell which ads are from them, pressure can be brought on and then from the advertisers. Simply contact the advertisers and tell them you'll not be buying any of their products/services because they are supporting Charter who is....(detail sins)
If inserted ads are not easily identified while mixed with those normally present, perhaps pressure could be brought on other connected advertisers. If Charter sets users up with a default startup/home page, any advertisers there or on connected pages would be fair game for example.
Any decent electronics project book will verify that any copper or aluminum wire will gain resistance with increasing temperature.
While what you say is true, there is no reason to believe that resistance losses are a significant portion of the total losses in our power supplies or that it that those losses increase by a significant percentage over the temperature range seen. Without proper analysis, facts can be used to jump to the wrong conclusions. (compare with dangers/effects of high power microwaves and discussion of WiFi for example)
In power supplies I've built that were similar but not identical to PC supplies, most of the losses were switching/conduction losses in the power transistor(s) and in the rectifiers. In the case of the rectifiers the conducting voltage drop actually gets SMALLER at higher temperatures. In practice, the main concern about elevated temperatures in a PC is an increase in the failure rates of components. Some simply fail if too hot. Thermal cycling can also cause cracks in solder connections over time. That means high temperature operation elevates failure rates both when it occurs and to a lesser extent later.
If one of these is expected to be networked in normal operation, perhaps it would be reasonable to require that antivirus software be running while doing benchmarks?
An earpiece does act like a microphone, but has very low sensitivity. Most modern phones have a condenser microphone which is powered and uses amplification. Legacy phones had a carbon microphone, which varied resistance with the audio pressure. Those need current (DC) through them to produce an audio voltage, and also have MUCH higher output than dynamic (moving coil in magnetic field) types.
The hybrid circuit in a phone really isn't about preventing the earpiece from acting as a microphone.
Because of line losses, the audio that you send down a phone line is at a much higher level than what is coming in. If the earpiece were simply across the line, your own audio in the earpiece would be uncomfortably loud. The hybrid in a phone is effectively taking some energy from the microphone and using it to cancel some of YOUR OWN audio heard from the line. Since the level, phase, and response of your audio on the line changes with line impedance, the sound the hybrid provides of your own voice changes when the line does. Changes in how you sound to yourself provide a good clue to something going on.
When someone adds a load to the line by picking up another phone, the caller will get quieter, but your own voice will seem louder (to you, not to the caller). Tonal characteristics will also change, perhaps becoming more hollow. A distant caller may get more echo from your end also. Of course someone that fully understands what's involved can use methods that won't load or unbalance the line keeping signal, noise and echo levels the same.
The real problem behind high gas prices isn't a lack of crude, but the lack of refineries. Global production of crude excedes demand by about 2 million barrels per day, but refineries are unable to keep up with demand for gasoline and other by-products.
Several years ago PBS had a feature on NOW which mentioned a large California refinery that was shut down. Given the high output of the refinery, some concluded that it was done to deliberately constrain capacity. I found the transcript. (audio or video may be available too)
Thanks much for the detailed info for trying WebKit. Using WebKit-SVN-r34342 the ACID 3 test passes 100%, and the javascript speed beat that in the blog even on my slower machine.
Summary: On a 2 GHz MacBook Core Duo with OS X 10.5.3 (Webkit 5525.18 4/20/08 shows in profiler)
Firefox 2.0.0.14 15205.0ms +/- 1.3% -- score about 4 runs per minute Safari 3.1.1 (5525.20) 4149.6ms +/- 0.5% -- score about 15 runs iCab 4.0.1 4142.2ms +/- 0.4% -- score about 15 runs Firefox 3 rc1 also about 4 ms -- score about 15 runs WebKit-SVN-r34342/ (shows as Safari 3.1.1) 2717.6ms -- score about 22 runs
Apple has done some odd things at times, but their old Human Interface Guidelines certainly had a lot of thought put into them. Even those that develop solely for other platforms certainly gain some useful perspective from spending some time looking at the design of and using apps on Macs. Many of the concepts were very simple, like not adding color unless it had a purpose. "Pretty" is a negative if it is just a distraction.
Changes in user interfaces can have unintended consequences too. In the Mac OS 9 and earlier era, the Finder would not display the same directory in two different windows. (If you opened it in a new one the first would close) Back in the early days of OS X, I was copying files to another volume then deleting the originals. I got distracted and came back, and deleted a bunch of files on noticing them in another window. It turned out that this other window wasn't the backup volume, just another view of the first... I'd thrown away my data!
For the most part web apps have never had the benefit of the sort of research that's gone into desktop apps. I wonder what the web would look like today if Hypercard had been designed to support links between different machines... That might have had an interesting evolution.
It'd also be fun to compare the benchmark for a number of different machines, browsers, and OS/framework builds. (any overclocked iPhones out there???)
On a 2 GHz MacBook Core Duo with OS X 10.5.3 (Webkit 5525.18 4/20/08 shows in profiler)
Firefox 2.0.0.14 15205.0ms +/- 1.3% -- score about 4 runs per minute Safari 3.1.1 (5525.20) 4149.6ms +/- 0.5% -- score about 15 runs iCab 4.0.1 4142.2ms +/- 0.4% -- score about 15 runs
Essentially identical results suggest that iCab 4 is also using Webkit. It looks like my test machine is a bit slower than whatever they used. Even without squirrelfish Safari and iCab are much faster than Firefox 2. Time to try 3.
Is it easy to try a nightly webkit+SqurrelFish build? Is it easy to revert if needed?
Like pesky system updates that may or may not allow you to boot into your OS. I forget which revision that was.)
Yes, although it wasn't Apple's fault, that still was a pain for a some when certain unsupported 3rd party hacks to add OS 9 style system extensions broke with an update. There was good reason for Apple doing away with the OS 9 type of system extensions when releasing OS X. While they allowed doing some great things, they were a major source of stability issues in OS 9 and earlier. Not only did those extensions often break with system updates, a significant number had problems with each other.
If one reads the Apple "Important: Read before installing" text (follow link "Apple's release page" in summary), they do warn of such things.
"You may experience unexpected results if you have third-party system software modifications installed, or if you've modified the operating system through other means. (This does not apply to normal application software installation.)"
The update went without a hitch on a Core Duo (32-bit) Intel system here (which took the smaller download). The machine worked well before, but my first impression is that Firefox feels a bit snappier now.
Why the hell is the department of justice hosting a manual on how to be a terrorist?
From the description on the linked page it is pretty clear the the worst how-to-build-something-really-nasty parts have been removed. What remains of the document is likely to be useful in understanding some things about these terrorists have behaved, perhaps helping to spot potential threats.
"The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al Qaeda member's home. The manual was found in a computer file described as "the military series" related to the "Declaration of Jihad." The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York. The Department is only providing the following selected text from the manual because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism.'
a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money
You'd think they'd be able to revise the laws if needed to cover webcams etc, and skip spending another billion dollars. With all of the money already spent on homeland security and law enforcement it seems like we ought to have enough infrastructure in place to deal with the problem.
With an economy hurting for a variety of reasons it seems like it's time to be much more careful with spending. Just exactly what is it these conservatives conserve anyway?
The same recovery techniques can be used, and they need not be expensive.
Not really. Software tools such as the one you mentioned, Magic Rescue, are for dealing with deleted files or corrupt file systems. That applies to both flash and magnetic drives. But for it to work on a magnetic drive, the drive pretty much has to be functional electrically and mechanically. Most drives like that would work after reformatting. For that software to work, the interface to the computer has to work, the spindle servo has to work, the head positioning system has to work, the heads have to be okay and have a working connection, and at least the read electronics has to work. A drive isn't really very dead if software can control it and read from it.
A failure of some part of the drive hardware is likely to require repair or substitution of what's broken. I was disappointed that the article provided almost NO useful details on that.
If the electronics has failed, substituting the circuit board from another drive of the same type seems like one thing that would be relatively easy. Those in the know should easily be able to tell if a head or connecting cable has become open-circuited. I suspect that cracked copper in the head flex cable is a fairly common problem. It is likely the as it first fails, a connection is lost more towards one end or the other of head travel. If one can run the electronics in a sort of diagnostic mode (to avoid aborting on errors), I suspect that a bit for bit copy can be attempted by physical location. That's likely what they're talking about when they mention making an image to recover from.
If the heads/cables are trashed and not easily repaired in place, swapping the platters into another drive (after removing any debris) is one of the more extreme measures.
There are probably alternate test-jig type fixtures available to substitute for normal drive electronics. I wouldn't be surprised if the most extreme tools allowed varying read-head preamp parameters and finely adjusting head positioning parameters.
It's kind of sad that so much information is unavailable to most of us. With full schematics, details of drive firmware etc a skilled technician can do component level repairs. People used to laugh at tv repairmen when sets came along where they'd just swap individual circuit boards instead of finding the bad component. But that's the sort of thing we now see most of the time with our computers and consumer electronics, if they get "fixed" at all. Most of the so called repair people know very little about electronics. It's understandable that the low replacement cost of much electronics has made labor-intensive repairs cost prohibitive, but I'd still like to see schematics available for everything.
It's sad that we've not only lost the majority of manufacturing jobs, but much of the service side too as a result of the "if it breaks buy a new one" way of doing things.
Let's hope other cases end with a similar outcome. Anyone up for tackling Visual Hub (OS X)?
I believe that the same violation of the GPL is occurring with the software Visual Hub for the Mac. While the core program is a separate GUI frontend and it's source need not be provided, the work of this popular video conversion utility is done by ffmpeg with the related codecs and multiplexers. The single modified ffmpeg binary is downloaded separately from the same servers as Visual Hub. When Visual Hub downloads the binary it presents a dialog saying it is separate due to licensing issues in SOME COUNTRIES. While there may be issues of using reverse-engineered codecs in some places, the GPL, which is not mentioned in the dialog, has no such boundaries. As I understand it the ffmpeg code is from the same group of developers as Mplayer and VLC. While there is an lengthy list of projects on the Mplayer site showing projects that use ffmpeg, Visual Hub is not Among them. As far as I could see, the Visual Hub author is also not shown as a code contributor.
While I find Visual Hub worth the price, I think it is wrong that the developer is not providing a direct link for a single archive of the source and make files for each version of the ffmpeg Mac binary that he's distributed.
This apparent violation of the GPL makes it far more difficult for others to examine and contribute code/fixes for improvements, and also makes it much harder to build other utilities, perhaps some where the entire utility including another gui frontend, is open source. The licensing must be complied with for all components of the binary (GPL/LGPL).
The modified ffmpeg binary being distributed appears to have has some command-line features stripped out, like the portions providing help and copyright information.
I think that when the Visual Hub utility presents a dialog to download the binary, there should be specific mention of the GPL and an option/button to get the ready to build source (codecs and all, exactly as used to make the Mac binary). The support site and documentation should also provide info on getting it too.
Occasional mention of such things on the support forums brings a shill poster talking about such things as the great bandwidth burden of providing source. That's utter nonsense as relatively few of the users of the utility would need/want the source. But under the GPL it should be available to them. It's not like everyone would be rushing out with free copies of the complete Visual Hub, the GUI interface is separate. It would be great if that were open source too, it does have a lot of room for polishing use of the more advanced features.
If I'm mistaken about any of this, I'd welcome correction.
What steps should one follow to insure that the Visual Hub developer complies with the GPL?
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If you do some research, the FCC was VERY close to legalizing low power FM stations, but then the measure just quietly died.
No it didn't. Things may not have turned out as some envisioned, but it happened. Due to interference issues, most of the available allocations were outside of major metropolitan areas. IIRC correctly, licenses were generally being granted to established non-profits. Religious broadcasters really moved in on that more than anyone it seems. They were ready too.
If you'd like to see what's out there now, do an FCC FM Database search.
For starters leave the fields blank, but for the popup menu choice under "Service:" Pick "Low Power FM FL", then a ways down the page hit the "Submit Data" button. That'll bring up 1000 or so entries. Those with LIC after the frequency are licensed. CP means construction permit. APP means application. MOD means modification (usually altered plans in a construction permit)
Check out the names of the licensees...
There's quite a bit of low-power TV around too.
Regulation is essential from a technical standpoint. The main area I have issues with is who gets the licenses and what their responsibilities are. Unfortunately major consolidation has been allowed in broadcasting. I would have liked to have seen the opposite where a large percentage of stations would have to be owned by licensees living in the coverage area.
All should be functioning as trustees of the public interest. The impact of media is huge on the functioning of Democracy, education, our economy and so many social issues. The deregulation that brought consolidation, infomercials, and anything for a buck has done great damage. Even those that don't see the deeper issues have likely noticed many more commercials than years ago, and a serious decline in the quality of programming.
Considering that selling influence to raise money for campaigns is one of the bigger components of our political corruption, we should look at ways of cutting the ad dollars to broadcasters. Stations should be required to provide free political public affairs time to candidates, and interested members of their community of license. Diversity in station ownership would help insure that a good cross section of views are presented.
The wrong regulations, or corruption in the process, have serious repercussions in the media just as we've seen with telephony/ISPs, food safety, banking, health care....
We need FCC regulation, but to serve the public, not broadcasters.
Positions in the FCC are by appointment. Keep that in mind when voting for those that make the appointments.
Whoops.. where I defined EIRP rating, I actually was describing antenna gain (actually 10 * log of the ratio (power needed into isotropic to match directional / power fed into directional) the units are dbi. Transmit power in dbm (db compared to a milliwatt) + antenna gain dbi = EIRP
dB are a log ratio always comparing something to a reference level. The nice thing about describing it all with logs of ratios is having the end calculations with power, gain and loss become simple adding and subtracting instead of multiplying.
(I should know better than to write when falling asleep...)
Although the reflectors for either C or Ku band dishes would work fine, it should be noted that the FCC regulates the effective radiated power. Check out FCC EIRP (equivalent isotropic radiated power) Limits.
The reference is an isotropic radiator... like having a point source radiating energy equally in ALL directions (up and down as well as the horizontal plane. A vertically oriented half-wavelength dipole has 2.15 dB gain over an isotropic radiator. If vertical, it radiates equally in all directions horizontally, but drops to nothing straight up and straight down.
Many have used a dipole as an alternate reference since it the lowest gain and most basic antenna normally constructed.
The EIRP rating is basically the amount of power it would take fed into an isotropic antenna to equal the signal produced from the gain (focusing effect) of a directional antenna. Some get confused by antenna gain. It doesn't give us more power than a transmitter puts out, it just concentrates the signal in a desired (hopefully!) direction at the expense of other directions.
The FCC rule differ for point to point versus point to multipoint WiFi. Point to multipoint the limit is 4 Watts effective regardless of antenna gain. (36 dBm, m being mw or milliwatts) A 100 mw card (20dbmw) feeding a 16 dBi gain antenna would produce 36 dbmw EIRP if there was no cable loss. If 3 dB was lost, it would take 200 mw into the cable to compensate (23dbm -3dB + 16dBi = 36
Point to multipoint starts at the level for a low gain antenna, but only requires a fairly small reduction in transmitter output power as higher antenna gain is used. So the maximum allowable signal does increase quite a bit with higher gain antennas.
Since things are pretty close to line of sight at 2.4 GHz, a huge dish near the ground (and not pointing up in the sky) isn't likely to do nearly as well as a smaller one up above the clutter. So most C band dishes (usually 2 to 4 meters across) are too big for most situations. Gain is probably best estimated by comparison with commercial dishes of the same diameter and frequency.
Allowable power is likely different in other countries. Your mileage (kilometerage????) may vary
I'm wondering how feasible it would be to provide some added DNS protection at the client end. Most of the computers and consumer routers I've dealt with took entries for three DNS servers (or got them by DHCP). I'm not sure whether all three get queried and the first result used, or the first queried, then the second if there's no response from the first?
Behavior probably varies by OS as this short tale illustrates a bug in Mac OS 9: (back on topic after this...)
Years ago I encountered a problem where some Mac OS 9 users using DHCP with Charter were getting "dead browser" behavior. They were not getting any DNS lookup when the first of the three Charter was giving by DHCP was a dead server. The Macs apparently weren't trying or using the results from the other two. Although I'd told Charter about it, the support person didn't apparently didn't think it mattered because I said I had my system running fine by using a different server with the DNS IPs entered manually. On visiting a friend having what he called "no connectivity" ask me to fix his machine, I found the problem was still there over 6 weeks later!!
At that point I called support and asked for a supervisor (which got me to someone in tier 2 management), and when I explained what was going on and that it had no doubt been affecting a number of people the response was "Oh shit!".... At last someone understood. Later that day I saw the DHCP server had been reconfigured to list one of the working DNSs twice, deleting the entry for the server that was down...
What I'm wondering now, is couldn't our client machines make better use of multiple DNS servers? I would have hoped they would ping all available occasionally (or just time lookup results), then make the fastest one the default to reduce latency.
Many times when I've seen people complaining their system was slow (for web surfing), the problem seemed to be DNS latency rather than one of bandwidth.
For the current topic where the trustworthiness of DNS results is the big issue, perhaps there could be a client mode that looks at the DNS results and requires all three, or at least two of three, to agree. That'd be slower, but more secure.
Perhaps some sort of alert box could be presented. Or perhaps something (like Apple's software update) could temporarily automatically throw the lookup into a require two or three matched results mode, while normally just using the fastest one?
I suppose the fastest could always be used, and then a warning dialog/alert box thrown up if the other servers disagree.
Of course it would probably best best if the three servers were unrelated, maybe one from the clients ISP, OpenDNS, and a third somewhere else. An added benefit might be optional detection/blocking of DNS provided ad pages.
Well I think you need to do a little more research first. The resolution isn't sub-par at all. Par would mean normal, median, average, etc. A little research turns up that essentially every 22" desktop monitor is 1680x1050. So the resolution is right on par.
As for LED backlighting, are you kidding me? That is currently very expensive. It's neat and all, but you aren't going to see it outside of either laptops (where the reduction in thickness and power is worth it) or extremely high end displays (where the increase in colour gamut is worth it). At present you need to be willing to drop serious cash to get such a display.
In calling it an HD monitor the expectations some have are different than what they'd be if it were simply marketed as a PC monitor. Quite a bit of HD content, even much over the air HD, is at 1920*1080, so these displays don't show the full detail of common source material. It's true that 1080i/p is generally not seen until one gets to about 24" screens (as found in the Apple iMac for instance). So 1080i/p HD has to be scaled down on this display. 720P mode HD is 1280*720, so that's well supported, but we've been able to get that much detail on some much smaller displays. Even the lower-cost series of Apple's laptops, the 13" MacBook, have supported 1280*800 for about two years now. $400 is still quite a bit of money, especially if one considers the relatively poor support and lifetime for these newer displays/sets. There are many c.r.t monitors and televisions that still work after 20 years. Most of the current generation will probably be junk when the backlight dies after a few years.
While most probably find the detail for video at 720P or so pleasing enough, other specifications that are not clearly shown that may actually impact perceived quality more. There's certainly a problem with some not being adequately revealed to or understood by consumers. I've seen panels that were actually only 6-bits per color instead of the 8 we were used to for many years. Depending on how those are driven, bright areas often look saturated/over-exposed, dark areas get blocky looking. Some of those awful looking dark areas look like something one could easily pass off as compression artifacts, so it can be something of a shock to discover they are due discarded bits of color depth in the display. Some displays get around the insufficient color depth by dithering, but that ads noise/grain. Generally the monitors with lower color depth panels have faster response times, and look great for gaming and general surfing/office use, but they're very disappointing for video. If they're sold for video, we should complain loudly.
In fairness, even some larger very expensive panels in the past fell short in ways some would not expect. Many of the large very costly plasma tv displays were only 1024*768 resolution even though they had a 16:9 aspect ratio (using non-square pixels). Technically they don't even qualify as low-end HD since the minimum is 720p (1280*720). Some of the smaller LCD televisions are really really awful.
Considering that consumers generally sit closer to smaller displays (easily occupying as much or more of the field of vision), there's just as great of a need to support the full detail of the content as with a larger one.
I agree that LED backlighting isn't quite here yet for TV use, but LEDs have had a continuing rapid improvements in brightness/efficiency (reminiscent of the speedup seen in CPUs). Seeing an Apple patent for slide in replaceable LED strips suggests that recent generations have had some issue with longevity. Hopefully as LEDs improve, they won't need to be pushed as hard and lifetimes will be better than other backlighting means. Considering the high power consumption of larger screen tv/PC displays, the significant improvement in efficiency LEDs could bring is a big deal. TVs and computers have become a very significant segment of household energy consumption. They really ought to come with stickers showing typical a
But lets not even think about the fine possibilities such as massive damage on the cellular level - just consider the overpressures that could be set up within blood vessels. It will be interesting to see if there is any increase in "massive cerebral hemorrage" as a cause of death going forward.
Kinda makes ya wonder who they tested this on, doesn't it?
Actually you've got the right idea with a tin foil hat. But since the signals may not be coming from the sky, the foil should wrap around as much of your head as possible. Looking through a metal screen or metal full of tiny holes should be effective in blocking signals approaching your face. The holes just have to be small relative to the wavelength of the signal. That should sound familiar since that's what's done in the windows in doors of microwave ovens.
Since the microwaves are in very short pulses the average power level apparently isn't high enough to cook you.
If the only effect is to hear something, it could be ineffective if one knows to simply ignore it.
How's this for an awful thought? .... send auditory spam to people via these microwaves...
I can see it now, crowds holding up shields to bounce signals back at their attackers
I was going to suggest that we put it in the water coolers in the House of Representatives and the Senate, for BOTH sides of the aisle.
Just be sure there's still some left to send to Fox network.
I was staying outside of LA in a high rise hotel a few years ago, and you could see the buildings of LA on the horizon, and they looked like they were covered by a slightly yellow dome of smog. It was very discernible, and seemed to have a solid line differentiating it from the clear air above.
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer
When dealing with a company that is generally not responsive to customer feedback, the only thing that they're likely to pay much attention to is lost business. If subscribers cancel their accounts and tell them why they are canceling that may be noticed. Those who can't cut the cord with them completely (due to lack of competing options) might still be able to reduce the customer count by arranging for neighbors to share connections via WiFi etc.
If they are selling advertising and there is a way to tell which ads are from them, pressure can be brought on and then from the advertisers. Simply contact the advertisers and tell them you'll not be buying any of their products/services because they are supporting Charter who is....(detail sins)
If inserted ads are not easily identified while mixed with those normally present, perhaps pressure could be brought on other connected advertisers. If Charter sets users up with a default startup/home page, any advertisers there or on connected pages would be fair game for example.
Any decent electronics project book will verify that any copper or aluminum wire will gain resistance with increasing temperature.
While what you say is true, there is no reason to believe that resistance losses are a significant portion of the total losses in our power supplies or that it that those losses increase by a significant percentage over the temperature range seen. Without proper analysis, facts can be used to jump to the wrong conclusions. (compare with dangers/effects of high power microwaves and discussion of WiFi for example)
In power supplies I've built that were similar but not identical to PC supplies, most of the losses were switching/conduction losses in the power transistor(s) and in the rectifiers. In the case of the rectifiers the conducting voltage drop actually gets SMALLER at higher temperatures.
In practice, the main concern about elevated temperatures in a PC is an increase in the failure rates of components. Some simply fail if too hot. Thermal cycling can also cause cracks in solder connections over time. That means high temperature operation elevates failure rates both when it occurs and to a lesser extent later.
If one of these is expected to be networked in normal operation, perhaps it would be reasonable to require that antivirus software be running while doing benchmarks?
An earpiece does act like a microphone, but has very low sensitivity. Most modern phones have a condenser microphone which is powered and uses amplification. Legacy phones had a carbon microphone, which varied resistance with the audio pressure. Those need current (DC) through them to produce an audio voltage, and also have MUCH higher output than dynamic (moving coil in magnetic field) types.
The hybrid circuit in a phone really isn't about preventing the earpiece from acting as a microphone.
Because of line losses, the audio that you send down a phone line is at a much higher level than what is coming in. If the earpiece were simply across the line, your own audio in the earpiece would be uncomfortably loud. The hybrid in a phone is effectively taking some energy from the microphone and using it to cancel some of YOUR OWN audio heard from the line. Since the level, phase, and response of your audio on the line changes with line impedance, the sound the hybrid provides of your own voice changes when the line does. Changes in how you sound to yourself provide a good clue to something going on.
When someone adds a load to the line by picking up another phone, the caller will get quieter, but your own voice will seem louder (to you, not to the caller). Tonal characteristics will also change, perhaps becoming more hollow. A distant caller may get more echo from your end also. Of course someone that fully understands what's involved can use methods that won't load or unbalance the line keeping signal, noise and echo levels the same.
The real problem behind high gas prices isn't a lack of crude, but the lack of refineries. Global production of crude excedes demand by about 2 million barrels per day, but refineries are unable to keep up with demand for gasoline and other by-products.
Several years ago PBS had a feature on NOW which mentioned a large California refinery that was shut down. Given the high output of the refinery, some concluded that it was done to deliberately constrain capacity. I found the transcript. (audio or video may be available too)
Excuse me, but isn't asking is something will fall up or down asking a loaded question?
Shouldn't we instead be asking how it will fall?
What if it falls on an imaginary axis and ends up travelling in time or to a parallel universe?
Thanks much for the detailed info for trying WebKit. Using WebKit-SVN-r34342 the ACID 3 test passes 100%, and the javascript speed beat that in the blog even on my slower machine.
Summary:
On a 2 GHz MacBook Core Duo with OS X 10.5.3 (Webkit 5525.18 4/20/08 shows in profiler)
Firefox 2.0.0.14 15205.0ms +/- 1.3% -- score about 4 runs per minute
Safari 3.1.1 (5525.20) 4149.6ms +/- 0.5% -- score about 15 runs
iCab 4.0.1 4142.2ms +/- 0.4% -- score about 15 runs
Firefox 3 rc1 also about 4 ms -- score about 15 runs
WebKit-SVN-r34342/ (shows as Safari 3.1.1) 2717.6ms -- score about 22 runs
Apple has done some odd things at times, but their old Human Interface Guidelines certainly had a lot of thought put into them. Even those that develop solely for other platforms certainly gain some useful perspective from spending some time looking at the design of and using apps on Macs.
Many of the concepts were very simple, like not adding color unless it had a purpose. "Pretty" is a negative if it is just a distraction.
Changes in user interfaces can have unintended consequences too. In the Mac OS 9 and earlier era, the Finder would not display the same directory in two different windows. (If you opened it in a new one the first would close) Back in the early days of OS X, I was copying files to another volume then deleting the originals. I got distracted and came back, and deleted a bunch of files on noticing them in another window. It turned out that this other window wasn't the backup volume, just another view of the first... I'd thrown away my data!
For the most part web apps have never had the benefit of the sort of research that's gone into desktop apps. I wonder what the web would look like today if Hypercard had been designed to support links between different machines... That might have had an interesting evolution.
Time to go walk the CyberDog...
It'd also be fun to compare the benchmark for a number of different machines, browsers, and OS/framework builds. (any overclocked iPhones out there???)
On a 2 GHz MacBook Core Duo with OS X 10.5.3 (Webkit 5525.18 4/20/08 shows in profiler)
Firefox 2.0.0.14 15205.0ms +/- 1.3% -- score about 4 runs per minute
Safari 3.1.1 (5525.20) 4149.6ms +/- 0.5% -- score about 15 runs
iCab 4.0.1 4142.2ms +/- 0.4% -- score about 15 runs
Essentially identical results suggest that iCab 4 is also using Webkit.
It looks like my test machine is a bit slower than whatever they used.
Even without squirrelfish Safari and iCab are much faster than Firefox 2. Time to try 3.
Is it easy to try a nightly webkit+SqurrelFish build? Is it easy to revert if needed?
Like pesky system updates that may or may not allow you to boot into your OS. I forget which revision that was.)
Yes, although it wasn't Apple's fault, that still was a pain for a some when certain unsupported 3rd party hacks to add OS 9 style system extensions broke with an update.
There was good reason for Apple doing away with the OS 9 type of system extensions when releasing OS X. While they allowed doing some great things, they were a major source of stability issues in OS 9 and earlier. Not only did those extensions often break with system updates, a significant number had problems with each other.
If one reads the Apple "Important: Read before installing" text (follow link "Apple's release page" in summary), they do warn of such things.
"You may experience unexpected results if you have third-party system software modifications installed, or if you've modified the operating system through other means. (This does not apply to normal application software installation.)"
The update went without a hitch on a Core Duo (32-bit) Intel system here (which took the smaller download). The machine worked well before, but my first impression is that Firefox feels a bit snappier now.
Why the hell is the department of justice hosting a manual on how to be a terrorist?
From the description on the linked page it is pretty clear the the worst how-to-build-something-really-nasty parts have been removed. What remains of the document is likely to be useful in understanding some things about these terrorists have behaved, perhaps helping to spot potential threats.
"The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al Qaeda member's home. The manual was found in a computer file described as "the military series" related to the "Declaration of Jihad." The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York. The Department is only providing the following selected text from the manual because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism.'
Fortunately the mental hospitals don't have Wi-Fi, just good old shock therapy.
a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money
You'd think they'd be able to revise the laws if needed to cover webcams etc, and skip spending another billion dollars. With all of the money already spent on homeland security and law enforcement it seems like we ought to have enough infrastructure in place to deal with the problem.
With an economy hurting for a variety of reasons it seems like it's time to be much more careful with spending. Just exactly what is it these conservatives conserve anyway?
The same recovery techniques can be used, and they need not be expensive.
Not really. Software tools such as the one you mentioned, Magic Rescue, are for dealing with deleted files or corrupt file systems. That applies to both flash and magnetic drives.
But for it to work on a magnetic drive, the drive pretty much has to be functional electrically and mechanically. Most drives like that would work after reformatting.
For that software to work, the interface to the computer has to work, the spindle servo has to work, the head positioning system has to work, the heads have to be okay and have a working connection, and at least the read electronics has to work. A drive isn't really very dead if software can control it and read from it.
A failure of some part of the drive hardware is likely to require repair or substitution of what's broken. I was disappointed that the article provided almost NO useful details on that.
If the electronics has failed, substituting the circuit board from another drive of the same type seems like one thing that would be relatively easy.
Those in the know should easily be able to tell if a head or connecting cable has become open-circuited. I suspect that cracked copper in the head flex cable is a fairly common problem. It is likely the as it first fails, a connection is lost more towards one end or the other of head travel. If one can run the electronics in a sort of diagnostic mode (to avoid aborting on errors), I suspect that a bit for bit copy can be attempted by physical location. That's likely what they're talking about when they mention making an image to recover from.
If the heads/cables are trashed and not easily repaired in place, swapping the platters into another drive (after removing any debris) is one of the more extreme measures.
There are probably alternate test-jig type fixtures available to substitute for normal drive electronics. I wouldn't be surprised if the most extreme tools allowed varying read-head preamp parameters and finely adjusting head positioning parameters.
It's kind of sad that so much information is unavailable to most of us. With full schematics, details of drive firmware etc a skilled technician can do component level repairs. People used to laugh at tv repairmen when sets came along where they'd just swap individual circuit boards instead of finding the bad component. But that's the sort of thing we now see most of the time with our computers and consumer electronics, if they get "fixed" at all. Most of the so called repair people know very little about electronics. It's understandable that the low replacement cost of much electronics has made labor-intensive repairs cost prohibitive, but I'd still like to see schematics available for everything.
It's sad that we've not only lost the majority of manufacturing jobs, but much of the service side too as a result of the "if it breaks buy a new one" way of doing things.
Space Lawyers, what a wonderful idea
The first thing that came to mind was banner ads in space made by dropping them out the airlock at just the right interval...
Let's hope other cases end with a similar outcome. Anyone up for tackling Visual Hub (OS X)?
I believe that the same violation of the GPL is occurring with the software Visual Hub for the Mac. While the core program is a separate GUI frontend and it's source need not be provided, the work of this popular video conversion utility is done by ffmpeg with the related codecs and multiplexers. The single modified ffmpeg binary is downloaded separately from the same servers as Visual Hub. When Visual Hub downloads the binary it presents a dialog saying it is separate due to licensing issues in SOME COUNTRIES. While there may be issues of using reverse-engineered codecs in some places, the GPL, which is not mentioned in the dialog, has no such boundaries. As I understand it the ffmpeg code is from the same group of developers as Mplayer and VLC. While there is an lengthy list of projects on the Mplayer site showing projects that use ffmpeg, Visual Hub is not Among them. As far as I could see, the Visual Hub author is also not shown as a code contributor.
While I find Visual Hub worth the price, I think it is wrong that the developer is not providing a direct link for a single archive of the source and make files for each version of the ffmpeg Mac binary that he's distributed.
This apparent violation of the GPL makes it far more difficult for others to examine and contribute code/fixes for improvements, and also makes it much harder to build other utilities, perhaps some where the entire utility including another gui frontend, is open source. The licensing must be complied with for all components of the binary (GPL/LGPL).
The modified ffmpeg binary being distributed appears to have has some command-line features stripped out, like the portions providing help and copyright information.
I think that when the Visual Hub utility presents a dialog to download the binary, there should be specific mention of the GPL and an option/button to get the ready to build source (codecs and all, exactly as used to make the Mac binary). The support site and documentation should also provide info on getting it too.
Occasional mention of such things on the support forums brings a shill poster talking about such things as the great bandwidth burden of providing source. That's utter nonsense as relatively few of the users of the utility would need/want the source. But under the GPL it should be available to them. It's not like everyone would be rushing out with free copies of the complete Visual Hub, the GUI interface is separate. It would be great if that were open source too, it does have a lot of room for polishing use of the more advanced features.
If I'm mistaken about any of this, I'd welcome correction.
What steps should one follow to insure that the Visual Hub developer complies with the GPL?