"standard" voice is current loop. The local loop can be miles long but the typical frequency is 300-3000 Hz
But... take a pair of wires and treat them as a radio antenna and you can do all manner of interesting things on it. Add in a signal processing and evaluation loop (intelligent frequency selection with adaptive signalling) and you can select a set of frequencies and signaling methods that can push an incredible amount of data down that twisted pair, even though it is also being used as a current loop for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)
Then add in phase modulation and other higher methods of encoding on one or more frequencies or bands.
That's the magic that the Telebit people pioneered. They really have not been given their due IMHO. $5000 (CDN) got us a modem that would walk all over the typical 1200Baud (and later 9600Baud) modems of the day.
Telus, the local CLEC, is rolling out 15Mbps in the local loop to server TV (competition to the local cable company who is of course now providing telephone). I spoke to the local installers as they were adding $100,000 worth of hardware to the local SAC(sp?) box, just around the corner from my home.
Twisted pair can carry a tremendous bandwidth - for some distance. The distance is getting longer as the technology advances but there likely is some reasonable limit. The point is that as we approach that limit, the distance is going to approach that at which it makes sense to put in fiber to replace it.
In the mean time, as the spectrum we know (i.e. is financially viable to put in play) about (below 60GHz today) gets used, the move to replace it for fixed use will include fiber so will keep up with the bandwidth needs, freeing up the airwaves for use strictly for mobile - and making the cells ever smaller.
Actually the real "ceiling" was the 9600 baud one - the telecom engineers said there simply was no way to go above this. Then along came the Telebit Trailblazer - 18,000 bps using a Motorola 68000 and a signal processing chip.
AT&T started buying them just to test telecom lines as they split the spectrum into 512 discreet bands where the telecom's tools split it into 16 bands.
The concept of phase encoding had never before been practical - now it is the ONLY way we encode things. What's next???
And this is the whole point - higher frequencies (they're commercializing 60GHz now - back when I first encountered it, it was bleeding edge and 90GHz was not even on the radar)
multi-GHz spectrum, micro-cells, spread-spectrum and software radios will make the problem domain shrink to the point where there simply isn't a problem. Today's traffic will be tomorrow's noise floor.
10 drives of the current "sweet spot" for drive size vs. cost/megabyte with a relatively inexpensive mother board and CPU and Linux.
started out with just over 2.5 Gigs with 300 Gig drives and now extends to over 10TB with 1.5TByte drives all done with RAID 5 and no spares
Currently have a half dozen of them in the house with various loads of video from "live streaming eagle nest cameras" and there are several more at the biologist's and out in the field.
Started out about $2500 (Canadian) and are down to around $1500 - but I've started putting faster chips (than the original Celerons) because I found that having them online was a good thing when doing video editing as a render farm but far better when they had some power:)
One thing to remember is that the bit error rate on these large drives is "per megabyte" which means the larger the drive, the more likely there will be a failure. I've been bitten once by a double failure before I could get a spare in and integrated - lost a whole array. I've seen one study that shows that the likelihood of a second drive failure before a spare is integrated, even if spare integration starts immediately an error is detected, is almost 100% once we hit about 3-4TBytes/drive. I've started using the drives as mirrored pairs and spreading the load (of video files) over them with other means than RAID 5 - even RAID 20 is not going to be enough IMHO - need something new like a completely new subsystem concept I saw a note about a while back but can't find at the moment - I'll post more if I recall/find it.
APL because you should learn at least one "write once, read never" language well enough to solve any problem with it yet not be able to read the solution two weeks after you wrote it.
LISP because you should learn that a really restrictive syntax can still be useful - and to covet less restrictive languages for what they attempt to be
FORTH because you should understand RPN and how to really use a stack when it makes sense
Assembler (or better yet, machine language) so you can appreciate what goes on at the hardware level and truly understand why you should revere and worship compiler writers - or better yet, if you have the math ability, become one - they're getting scarce.
Fortran because you should understand why scientists like it so much and why you should not annoy them unnecessarily about this
PL1 so you can appreciate just how much cruft can intrude on what might otherwise have been a truly useful language, all in the name of being "the only tool you'll need"
Having done this you'll be prepared to learn any language's syntax and understand that in most cases it is the libraries that you really need to learn and appreciate. You'll learn the language that makes your employer happy or that is most relevant to the project at hand - and probably keep on learning languages for the rest of your life. I know - I've never stopped - forgotten more than mentioned above by at least an order of magnitude.
But if you want to sit in a cube farm and crank code day after day then by all means, learn and live with only C++ or C# or even Java. Personally, I'd rather hire someone a bit more flexible.
OK - so I plug my cell into the USB dongle that charges it - now I want the phone to be answered by the AI in my machine - and filter the call: pass it through via the speakers and microphones in the house, record a message, or call the FTC/CRTC for the voice spammer.
So I want all the functionality of turning the phone into a demarc point to the cell service - so I can call out, answer, ignore or whatever - but through the AI (penguin powered) in my home.
Have to say that I don't think I've ever got that high (550) - probably 100 or so as I really don't use that many tabs - but I regularly have 40-50 windows open.
I have the Flash 10 plugin - still get "silent death" of all windows any time from a few hours to a few days.
With 5 monitors as a single desktop - and 12 virtual desktops - I can easily have 20+ browser windows open and some of them have lots of tabs at times. I prefer to have no tabs but there are times when it works fine - even with 30+
for example I open a tab for each of the many new users we get applying to our forum - and then go through all of them, closing the ones that I've done, while I click the "accept" box on another browser window on a different screen. Much faster than going back and forth on a single screen
And all of a sudden - blink - they're all gone.
Wish Chrome ran on Linux:(
Maybe some form of "virtual desktop" visual 2D matrix would work better. Not a tree - could be too deep.
My desktop icon shows 3x12 matrix and it keeps me sane - similar thing instead of tabs would take up far less room on the browser bar - don't need labels because the visual clue is easier to remember in matrix form:
Top left is e-mail, next on line is Slashdot, followed by Groklaw and Linkedin
Next line has projects
Third line has other crap
People who can't think in 2D and need labels can continue using IE;)
I have a local mod that checks for a short list of IP addresses and does NOT put them into iptables:)
Got caught once - but got in from one of my other machines (and I have remote console via a completely different link) so was not disaster - just annoying, so I put in the fix - works with my relay-allow for exim so kills 2 birds with one file:)
None of my systems allow passwords via ssh - and I run log-guardian.pl to "3 strikes - you're out" the idiots who do the brute-forces by putting them into iptables
Anyone with passwords turned on is not secure IMHO
You've just outlined what is called "the analog hole" - and should know that the media people want to add DRM to EVERY chip or circuit that could possibly record in such a situation so that it would recognize subtle clues in the audio that would tag it as copyright media (even after the copyright period has expired it seems)
Every time you use the analog hole you lose fidelity - that's the real kicker.
As the original author of anything that is subject to Copyright you are free to license the same piece of work (even if it is undergoing continuous change by you) under several licenses - and it is also available under the basic grounds of Copyright in the country of origin too.
This means that I can write and sell commercial software - and also license the same software under the GPL (or Creative Commons for text/images, etc.)
But those who don't subscribe to the GPL/CC can still use Fair Use to talk about my code or other work - even down to publishing "abstracts" of it.
The major concern is not MY code - it is what is contributed by others to my (GPL or other license) code - and what I can do with it.
A license that states "you can make changes but I own all such changes that you submit to me and may sell them along with my code" is completely different from GPL.
So is a license that states "you can make changes but you license them to me such that I can sell them along with my code even without attribution to you"
Using license terms to allow an "open source" following to build your basic software's reputation so you can then sell your "premium" version of it is a growing method of doing business.
On the other hand we've seen businesses that have recognized that the open source version has ended up with better following and better (or at least more diverse) options - and ended up opening up their premium system too - and moving to the pure service/maintenance/extension business model.
There's room for it all - the market will tell which works best for each instance.
January 13, 2010 - Redmond WA
After receiving thousands of calls from irate vacationers, Microsoft today issued a warning that taking pictures at your favorite tourist spot should be done with care to ensure that no Microsoft Tag is in frame as there are spammers "out there" littering the visual landscape with tags that point to porn and hate sites.
Back in 1979 my first formal course in programming started out with the Turing machine - and frankly I'm glad.
IMHO today's junior programmers don't have nearly enough background in either formal program definition or the underlying hardware that eventually ends up executing whatever the high level language compiles or interprets to.
As I understand it, hydrogen is simply an energy storage medium in the grand scheme of things and should be compared mostly to battery/capacitor technologies; at least in the short term.
In the short term we are talking about replacing the hydrocarbons of gasoline et al with the pure hydrogen burning in moving vehicles. How much energy it takes to create the hydrogen has to compare favourably with the life-cycle cost of creating and feeding batteries or capacitors including externalities such as polution.
Creating hydrogen by burning fossil fuels is completely missing the point - that of stopping the creation of carbon dioxide and other polutants.
Creating hydrogen from solar/wind/wave we don't care how inefficient it is in general as the point is to stop burning the fossil fuels - and the energy would end up in the environment anyway if we don't use it first to generate some electricity, then hydrogen. All we're doing is moving the resulting heat from where the wind/solar farm is to where the hydrogen is used - not much of a problem.
In the long term there is the opportunity to generate hydrogen fairly directly from atomic energy (as well as from the above sources) but this is feasable only in large quantities it seems (I may be wrong - the life-cycle diagram I recall seeing was over a year ago) - and it would be necessary to create pipelines for the fuel to be distributed. The idea was that the super-cool pipes could also be used to cool super-conducting wires so we got the benefit of more efficient electricity distribution too.
But we need a hydrogen-using infrastructure to justify the creation of the hydrogen supply infrastructure - so use of current generation schemes is one way to kick-start the process.
Note I am not generally in favour of the hydrogen society at this point (far more hazerdous than gas is for example) but can see that it might be one way to go if nobody invents something like the "shipstone" of Science Fiction fame (100% efficient and huge capacity static energy storage container) which bears more than a passing resemblance to a very good capacitor.
The paranoia comes in when we talk about atomic power. IMHO without atomic power it is silly to talk of hydrogen use on any scale.
If the employee chooses the system and owns it (i.e. works from home and uses own equipment) then maybe.
but if the business chooses the equipment and mandates that it be shut down at end of shift and started up at beginning - then it is absolutely work related and an aspect of the (in)efficiency of the chosen tools of the employer.
Brings to mind a somewhat similar "Vigilante Justice" story from the past.
Irnalee Stohrs' phone number was inadvertently printed as the contact number on a bunch of summons from the local Juvenile court - only after people from all over the country started phoning the court would they (the court) do something about this flood of calls the poor lady was getting. Read the story from Comp.Dcom.Telecom Usenet group 1990 postings
Maybe the "proper authorities" need something like this to open their eyes too.
A few paragraphs down the page of documentation there is a link to another tool that allows you to turn off storage of these "cookies" and/or set their max storage to something less than the stated default of 100K
'"Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible."(Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.) '
This is not correct AFAIK - the original author of something, no matter whether it is published under some license somewhere, can re-publish the same content under a different license unless some contract (say with the book publisher) prohibits this for contractual reasons.
I write in by blog under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike - but I can re-publish my own works somewhere else under a completely different license or none at all, simply relying upon the Copyright Act for my protection.
The same goes for something written in Wikipedia no matter what license it is in. It is the inclusion of that writing by someone else (other than the author) that will trigger the viral nature of its license.
So... IMHO anyone who has contributed anything to Wikipedia may copy their own works (and nothing else) to Knol without any fear of triggering the viral license. They may also re-publish their own work anywhere else they want too.
To those who think "the government should" - where does the government get its money? (ok - they print it but inflation takes it from our pockets)
To those who think "the ISPs should" - where do they get THEIR money from? - the customers (ok - sometimes they get it from investors, who got it from profits from selling something to the public - time wounds all heals).
The end result is that the general public ends up paying if the service is "universal" (everyone uses it - like the internet) - or "user pays" if it is something that is not wide-spread
all else is a result of inertia in the payment system.
If you "need" a laptop - it should be as secondary to your desktop. A laptop is for travel - working on your lap, not your desktop - and certainly not remotely from home. Take the damned thing home if you need to work on stuff that it contains while there. If the company doesn't authorize you to take it home then you sure as heck should not be able to rdesktop/vnc to it from there either!!!
If you travel enough to need a laptop you should understand that if/when you cross to the US from any other country the US security/INS/customs people have recently been given pretty much carte blanche to seize/browse/copy the contents of your laptop (and your MP3 player and video/still camera, cell phone, etc. - in the same way they can look through your luggage) so you should not have things that are secret or "secure" or personal on it anyway.
"Normal" PCs can be bolted down with various devices to keep them from being removed - and in some places should be.
Laptops - even the ones that masquerade as "real" PCs should not be considered primary holders of data - so either you should not care (because they don't hold data) or you should not be accessing them remotely (access the data directly via VPN or... - not via your laptop sitting on your desktop where it should not be)
If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like it should be put together with nails - if all you have is a laptop the world looks like it should cater to your inadequacy. You're asking the wrong question.
The question should be "why is my employer forcing me to only use a laptop?"
So creating a specialized vessel just to do undersea fibre taps seems out of the question?
Depends on whose budget you're talking about
Take a look at the stuff on Project Jennifer at Wikipedia
Slashdot Mirror
But... take a pair of wires and treat them as a radio antenna and you can do all manner of interesting things on it. Add in a signal processing and evaluation loop (intelligent frequency selection with adaptive signalling) and you can select a set of frequencies and signaling methods that can push an incredible amount of data down that twisted pair, even though it is also being used as a current loop for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)
Then add in phase modulation and other higher methods of encoding on one or more frequencies or bands.
That's the magic that the Telebit people pioneered. They really have not been given their due IMHO. $5000 (CDN) got us a modem that would walk all over the typical 1200Baud (and later 9600Baud) modems of the day.
Twisted pair can carry a tremendous bandwidth - for some distance. The distance is getting longer as the technology advances but there likely is some reasonable limit. The point is that as we approach that limit, the distance is going to approach that at which it makes sense to put in fiber to replace it.
In the mean time, as the spectrum we know (i.e. is financially viable to put in play) about (below 60GHz today) gets used, the move to replace it for fixed use will include fiber so will keep up with the bandwidth needs, freeing up the airwaves for use strictly for mobile - and making the cells ever smaller.
If you need a tower, your cell is too large
AT&T started buying them just to test telecom lines as they split the spectrum into 512 discreet bands where the telecom's tools split it into 16 bands.
The concept of phase encoding had never before been practical - now it is the ONLY way we encode things. What's next???
multi-GHz spectrum, micro-cells, spread-spectrum and software radios will make the problem domain shrink to the point where there simply isn't a problem. Today's traffic will be tomorrow's noise floor.
started out with just over 2.5 Gigs with 300 Gig drives and now extends to over 10TB with 1.5TByte drives all done with RAID 5 and no spares
Currently have a half dozen of them in the house with various loads of video from "live streaming eagle nest cameras" and there are several more at the biologist's and out in the field.
Started out about $2500 (Canadian) and are down to around $1500 - but I've started putting faster chips (than the original Celerons) because I found that having them online was a good thing when doing video editing as a render farm but far better when they had some power :)
One thing to remember is that the bit error rate on these large drives is "per megabyte" which means the larger the drive, the more likely there will be a failure. I've been bitten once by a double failure before I could get a spare in and integrated - lost a whole array. I've seen one study that shows that the likelihood of a second drive failure before a spare is integrated, even if spare integration starts immediately an error is detected, is almost 100% once we hit about 3-4TBytes/drive. I've started using the drives as mirrored pairs and spreading the load (of video files) over them with other means than RAID 5 - even RAID 20 is not going to be enough IMHO - need something new like a completely new subsystem concept I saw a note about a while back but can't find at the moment - I'll post more if I recall/find it.
LISP because you should learn that a really restrictive syntax can still be useful - and to covet less restrictive languages for what they attempt to be
FORTH because you should understand RPN and how to really use a stack when it makes sense
Assembler (or better yet, machine language) so you can appreciate what goes on at the hardware level and truly understand why you should revere and worship compiler writers - or better yet, if you have the math ability, become one - they're getting scarce.
Fortran because you should understand why scientists like it so much and why you should not annoy them unnecessarily about this
PL1 so you can appreciate just how much cruft can intrude on what might otherwise have been a truly useful language, all in the name of being "the only tool you'll need"
Having done this you'll be prepared to learn any language's syntax and understand that in most cases it is the libraries that you really need to learn and appreciate. You'll learn the language that makes your employer happy or that is most relevant to the project at hand - and probably keep on learning languages for the rest of your life. I know - I've never stopped - forgotten more than mentioned above by at least an order of magnitude.
But if you want to sit in a cube farm and crank code day after day then by all means, learn and live with only C++ or C# or even Java. Personally, I'd rather hire someone a bit more flexible.
So I want all the functionality of turning the phone into a demarc point to the cell service - so I can call out, answer, ignore or whatever - but through the AI (penguin powered) in my home.
There's a product in there somewhere!
I have the Flash 10 plugin - still get "silent death" of all windows any time from a few hours to a few days.
for example I open a tab for each of the many new users we get applying to our forum - and then go through all of them, closing the ones that I've done, while I click the "accept" box on another browser window on a different screen. Much faster than going back and forth on a single screen And all of a sudden - blink - they're all gone.
Wish Chrome ran on Linux :(
Maybe some form of "virtual desktop" visual 2D matrix would work better. Not a tree - could be too deep.
My desktop icon shows 3x12 matrix and it keeps me sane - similar thing instead of tabs would take up far less room on the browser bar - don't need labels because the visual clue is easier to remember in matrix form:
Top left is e-mail, next on line is Slashdot, followed by Groklaw and Linkedin
Next line has projects
Third line has other crap
People who can't think in 2D and need labels can continue using IE ;)
Got caught once - but got in from one of my other machines (and I have remote console via a completely different link) so was not disaster - just annoying, so I put in the fix - works with my relay-allow for exim so kills 2 birds with one file :)
Anyone with passwords turned on is not secure IMHO
Every time you use the analog hole you lose fidelity - that's the real kicker.
As the original author of anything that is subject to Copyright you are free to license the same piece of work (even if it is undergoing continuous change by you) under several licenses - and it is also available under the basic grounds of Copyright in the country of origin too.
This means that I can write and sell commercial software - and also license the same software under the GPL (or Creative Commons for text/images, etc.)
But those who don't subscribe to the GPL/CC can still use Fair Use to talk about my code or other work - even down to publishing "abstracts" of it.
The major concern is not MY code - it is what is contributed by others to my (GPL or other license) code - and what I can do with it.
A license that states "you can make changes but I own all such changes that you submit to me and may sell them along with my code" is completely different from GPL.
So is a license that states "you can make changes but you license them to me such that I can sell them along with my code even without attribution to you"
Using license terms to allow an "open source" following to build your basic software's reputation so you can then sell your "premium" version of it is a growing method of doing business.
On the other hand we've seen businesses that have recognized that the open source version has ended up with better following and better (or at least more diverse) options - and ended up opening up their premium system too - and moving to the pure service/maintenance/extension business model.
There's room for it all - the market will tell which works best for each instance.
Best of a bad lot. Remove Windoze from IE.
January 13, 2010 - Redmond WA After receiving thousands of calls from irate vacationers, Microsoft today issued a warning that taking pictures at your favorite tourist spot should be done with care to ensure that no Microsoft Tag is in frame as there are spammers "out there" littering the visual landscape with tags that point to porn and hate sites.
Back in 1979 my first formal course in programming started out with the Turing machine - and frankly I'm glad.
IMHO today's junior programmers don't have nearly enough background in either formal program definition or the underlying hardware that eventually ends up executing whatever the high level language compiles or interprets to.
In the short term we are talking about replacing the hydrocarbons of gasoline et al with the pure hydrogen burning in moving vehicles. How much energy it takes to create the hydrogen has to compare favourably with the life-cycle cost of creating and feeding batteries or capacitors including externalities such as polution.
Creating hydrogen by burning fossil fuels is completely missing the point - that of stopping the creation of carbon dioxide and other polutants.
Creating hydrogen from solar/wind/wave we don't care how inefficient it is in general as the point is to stop burning the fossil fuels - and the energy would end up in the environment anyway if we don't use it first to generate some electricity, then hydrogen. All we're doing is moving the resulting heat from where the wind/solar farm is to where the hydrogen is used - not much of a problem.
In the long term there is the opportunity to generate hydrogen fairly directly from atomic energy (as well as from the above sources) but this is feasable only in large quantities it seems (I may be wrong - the life-cycle diagram I recall seeing was over a year ago) - and it would be necessary to create pipelines for the fuel to be distributed. The idea was that the super-cool pipes could also be used to cool super-conducting wires so we got the benefit of more efficient electricity distribution too.
But we need a hydrogen-using infrastructure to justify the creation of the hydrogen supply infrastructure - so use of current generation schemes is one way to kick-start the process.
Note I am not generally in favour of the hydrogen society at this point (far more hazerdous than gas is for example) but can see that it might be one way to go if nobody invents something like the "shipstone" of Science Fiction fame (100% efficient and huge capacity static energy storage container) which bears more than a passing resemblance to a very good capacitor.
The paranoia comes in when we talk about atomic power. IMHO without atomic power it is silly to talk of hydrogen use on any scale.
but if the business chooses the equipment and mandates that it be shut down at end of shift and started up at beginning - then it is absolutely work related and an aspect of the (in)efficiency of the chosen tools of the employer.
Brings to mind a somewhat similar "Vigilante Justice" story from the past. Irnalee Stohrs' phone number was inadvertently printed as the contact number on a bunch of summons from the local Juvenile court - only after people from all over the country started phoning the court would they (the court) do something about this flood of calls the poor lady was getting. Read the story from Comp.Dcom.Telecom Usenet group 1990 postings Maybe the "proper authorities" need something like this to open their eyes too.
Global Storage Settings panel
And near the bottom, a link to the Global Privacy Settings panel
'"Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible."(Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.) '
This is not correct AFAIK - the original author of something, no matter whether it is published under some license somewhere, can re-publish the same content under a different license unless some contract (say with the book publisher) prohibits this for contractual reasons.
I write in by blog under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike - but I can re-publish my own works somewhere else under a completely different license or none at all, simply relying upon the Copyright Act for my protection.
The same goes for something written in Wikipedia no matter what license it is in. It is the inclusion of that writing by someone else (other than the author) that will trigger the viral nature of its license.
So... IMHO anyone who has contributed anything to Wikipedia may copy their own works (and nothing else) to Knol without any fear of triggering the viral license. They may also re-publish their own work anywhere else they want too.
To those who think "the government should" - where does the government get its money? (ok - they print it but inflation takes it from our pockets)
To those who think "the ISPs should" - where do they get THEIR money from? - the customers (ok - sometimes they get it from investors, who got it from profits from selling something to the public - time wounds all heals).
The end result is that the general public ends up paying if the service is "universal" (everyone uses it - like the internet) - or "user pays" if it is something that is not wide-spread
all else is a result of inertia in the payment system.
If you travel enough to need a laptop you should understand that if/when you cross to the US from any other country the US security/INS/customs people have recently been given pretty much carte blanche to seize/browse/copy the contents of your laptop (and your MP3 player and video/still camera, cell phone, etc. - in the same way they can look through your luggage) so you should not have things that are secret or "secure" or personal on it anyway.
"Normal" PCs can be bolted down with various devices to keep them from being removed - and in some places should be.
Laptops - even the ones that masquerade as "real" PCs should not be considered primary holders of data - so either you should not care (because they don't hold data) or you should not be accessing them remotely (access the data directly via VPN or... - not via your laptop sitting on your desktop where it should not be)
If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like it should be put together with nails - if all you have is a laptop the world looks like it should cater to your inadequacy. You're asking the wrong question.
The question should be "why is my employer forcing me to only use a laptop?"
So creating a specialized vessel just to do undersea fibre taps seems out of the question? Depends on whose budget you're talking about Take a look at the stuff on Project Jennifer at Wikipedia