Re:why ham radio isn't popular
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
Isn't that essentially the same motivation that drives kernel hackers? Who don't really care about what computing gets done, just that it can be done on a kernel they built themselves...
Open source software is also an instrument of social change - improving the linux kernel empowers the masses in addition to having a direct effect on other people being able to get their work done. This is a significant motivating factor for a lot of people, and is one reason why Linux is popular and Minix is not.
Wireless networking is also an instrument of social change - it allows people to communicate directly with each other without having to rely on third party infrastructure. Unfortunately, ham radio has too many restrictions to enable this sort of social change, so it's happening in the unlicensed spectrum (see the personal telco project for one of many example).
-jim
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
If you want to do that via radio link, you need only invest in a wireless network card for your laptop, and hook up with any WiFi hotspot in your part of the country.
I think you have a bit too much faith in 802.11 if you think it's a drop-in replacement for a ham radio. I have used 802.11 at five miles with 24db antennas and direct line of sight. I wish there was a happy medium - I can either use high-throughput 35mw radios that go a few miles at best, but I can do anything I want with them, or I can (as soon as I get my license) use 1500 watt radios that can bounce signals off the moon (not that I plan to try this right away...), but I can't use them for anything useful unless its an emergency. Maybe the FCC will open up some more unlicensed spectrum, but I'm not holding my breath.
We already have a perfectly usable infrastructure in place for E-mail
Why do people talk over ham radio if they already have a telephone?
You appear to be trying to fit amateur radio into the mold of something that it is not (wireless data networking, specifically Internet connectivity), and was never intended to be.....
Also remember that another of the primary purposes for the existence of the service is to foster experimentation and ongoing learning in the realm of radio and communications theory (in short: a whole lot of tinkering with electronic goodies -- yes, that means learning how to solder), as spelled out in 97.1 paragraphs b, c, and d.
Soldering is not that interesting. Creating new routing protocols is. With a good routing protocol, a wireless network can use spectrum more efficiently and support more users. Communicating with people on the other side of the planet directly, without repeaters, does not scale well. Secure routing requires (at minimum) digital signatures (which, according to other posts, are permissible, since they don't obscure the meaning of the communication), or else a malicious user can bring down the whole network by advertising bogus routes.
If you're going up for your Technician license exam, you should already be fairly familiar with Part 97, and have (hopefully) taken at least section 97.1 to heart. Based on your statements in your post, I get the distinct impression that you have not.
Being aware of and following the rules is what is required. Agreeing with them is not. I'm willing to concede that they may be a necessary evil.
-jim
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
However, if they allowed encryption, it would close the hobby and people would use it for commercial purposes. Bandwidth is very scarce. (Well, that's a topic for another post!)
Maybe an acceptable compromise would be to allow encryption and/or commercial use, but only for digital communication methods that don't use much bandwidth (such as PSK31). That way, the people who want encrypted email or ssh from the boonies, and want it bad enough that they'll get a license and live with low speeds, can have it without clogging the spectrum.
-jim
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Coincidentally, I'm actually planning to take my technician's license test this weekend.
As an outsider, it seems to me that there's a connection between the lack of popularity of ham radio and the severe restrictions placed on what can be done with it.
For instance: sure, I can check my email over ham radio, but I'm not allowed to use encryption. So, to check my email I have to either a)broadcast my IMAP password to everyone within hundreds of miles, or b)disable passwords altogether and leave my mail account wide open.
Neither of these options seem very appealling, In the networking community, cryptography is seen as a great thing.
What do most ham operators think of these kinds of restrictions (no crypto, no music, no commercial traffic)? Do you like having the openness that a no-crypto policy implies, or do you prefer to keep the airwaves uncluttered by non-ham radio related personal/commercial traffic, or do you all grumble at the FCCs outdated restrictions?
While I usually subscribe to the "more is better" school of thought, I'm also wondering what they're optimizing for. It seems like single mode fiber should be good enough for just about anything - it has a theoretical capacity of many terabits per second, with a useable range of about 60 miles. The price of cable is usually dominated by the protective covering they put around it, which is in turn dominated by the price of the backhoe to install it, so I don't think cost is much of an issue.
The article vaguely implied that maybe flexibility and durability was the issue. It also mentioned puting a pattern of little holes in the fiber. Does anyone know what those are for?
In my opinion, Google's market dominance has more to do with massive computing and network resources than technology. (Their reputation of being not evil doesn't hurt, either.)
It's hard for anyone to compete with Google without having enough bandwidth to crawl a large portion of the web on a regular basis, and then store the resulting data structures in RAM.
It seems to me that the most reasonable solution would be to design a sealed-case hydrogen fuel cell with three compartments, one for water, one for hydrogen, and one for oxygen (if the gasses have to be stored separately-I'm not sure). When all the hydrogen and oxygen have been converted to water, you plug it in, and the water is split back into oxygen and hydrogen by electrolysis.
Has anyone built such a device? Are they impractical for some reason (too large, too heavy, too expensive, difficult to manufacture, etc...)?
I post to slashdot and recently have run into a slew of frustrations trying to get my posts modded up. For instance, one really frustrating thing is, moderators slap me with a -1 when they encounter something that might be confusing to them in the post. They take it as a negative, when really a very simple follow up post from the author would clear it up. After all, its the revevance of the content, not 1337 3ngr15h skillz that is being moderated.
What are some of the frustrations you have come across when posting to slashdot, and have you any ideas on how to improve on the moderation process?
Another really frustrating point is many people feel that some posts get an automatic +2 on the basis excellent karma, not purely on the merit of the post itself (i.e., the burden of originality is lessened for established slashdotters), while the opposite is true for posters with bad karma or a high account number (i.e., the burden of proof for creative posts may be higher, sometimes unreasonably so).
One's list of friends and fans also helps, to a certain extent (if you are a friend of a slashdot Rock Star, you are more likely to get modded up).
In the examples above, a follow-up anonymous coward post by the reviewer might solve this particular problem (lest the reviewer lose the ability to moderate by posting with his regular account); also, I think that if the identities of the moderators are protected, why not the authors? Perhaps a solution to my second issue would be to have the author's names hidden from anyone with mod points (as in metamoderation).
I've played go a little bit myself, but I'm not very good at it. For a game with so few rules, it's surprisingly complicated. Here's more information if you're interested in learning about the game, and here's a more in-depth explaination of the rules.
I couldn't help but notice the following were listed as "losers":
John Kerry
George Bush
Tony Blair
Abu Ghraib
-jim
Wifi is here to stay, but will you have to pay?
on
Spokane Gets Unwired
·
· Score: 1
Just like the earlier dotcoms, companies are scrambing to make their mark. Some will fail miserably, some will grow to be giants, and some will be successful and be eaten (or destroyed) by the giants.
This is what worries me. With wireless networking, it is possible to build free community networks that span large distances and don't rely on rented infrastructure (phone lines, cable, etc...), except for uplink to the rest of the internet. (For an example of what such a network would look like, check out roofnet)
If a commercial provider can provide "good enough" service for cheap, it removes part of the incentive to create high quality community networks that are free.
David Cohen-Steiner, Pierre Alliez, and Mathieu Desbrun
To appear, ACM SIGGRAPH '04.
Abstract: Achieving efficiency in mesh processing often demands that overly verbose 3D datasets be reduced to more concise, yet faithful representations. Despite numerous applications ranging from geometry compression to reverse engineering, concisely capturing the geometry of a surface remains a tedious task. In this paper, we present both theoretical and practical contributions that result in a novel and versatile framework for geometric approximation of surfaces. We depart from the usual strategy by casting shape approximation as a variational geometric partitioning problem. Using the concept of geometric proxies, we drive the distortion error down through repeated clustering of faces into best-fitting regions. Our approach is entirely discrete and error-driven, and does not require parameterization or local estimations of differential quantities. We also introduce a new metric based on normal deviation, and demonstrate its superior behavior at capturing anisotropy.
Renewed competion between broadband providers
on
Linux Unwired
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Besides user convenience, one of the benefits of wireless networks (particularly long-range wireless) is that they can compete directly with DSL, Cable modem, and landline phone service. My parents live out in the country on a hill about five miles from the nearest large town (McMinnville, OR). They have fast internet service thanks to a reasonably forward-looking ISP who set up a wireless network using radios from waverider. Unfortunately, the waverider site doesn't list prices anymore (I believe they used to sell an access point and five client radio modems for about $5000 or so, and additional radios were about $400). It uses the 902-928 mhz ISM band, so there's no FCC license required, and the line-of-sight requirements aren't as strict as 802.11. Once 802.16 (wimax) gets established, similar performing, cheaper, non-proprietary radios may become available.
This is a great way to compete with cable modem and DSL without needing to deploy much infrustructure. Any well-motivated party can set up one of these networks. It may also compel landline internet providers to offer higher throughput and better service, which is good for everyone.
Stupid idea. Unless one of your friends on that ISP are hosting a bandwidth-intensive server, it doesn't matter that you could potentially be getting really fast connection speeds between you. What, you get your IMs faster? Awesome.
Not everyone uses the internet solely for instant messaging, email, and web browsing. I would love to be able to download linux ISOs from whoever in the neighborhood got them first, rather than fighting over the mirrors. Other large files could be shared as well. Use your imagination.
I could see an ISP maybe offering 200mbps speeds between customers of the same ISP in the same city, as an incentive for customers to convince all their friends to join. It doesn't cost them anything if their customers are just using spare capacity on the local loop. Of course, the upload is probably a lot less than 200mbps, and if multiple ISPs offered the same service, it wouldn't take long before some enterprising customer would sign up for both and run a gateway between the two (not that that would harm anything, but the ISPs probably wouldn't like it).
I already mentioned this in another post, but these people created a ray tracer with non-instantaneous values of c, like 1m/s. They have a few interesting animations on their site that simulate doppler shift and some of the relativistic effects that occur when travelling at speeds approaching c.
-jim
Relativistic ray tracer from Australia
on
POV-Ray 3.6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Cool! They've changed the speed of light!
I know you're joking, but these people really did make a ray tracer where you can change the value of c. They have a few animations where they set the speed of light to small values like 1m/s.
Pov-ray can do soft shadows by doing shadow ray tests at every point sampled, with the light source moved slightly at each sample. It also can compute global illumination using a radiosity-like algorithm (they call it radiosity, but I'm not sure it's a true radiosity algorithm, path tracing perhaps?) They also have photon mapping, which is in many ways superior to radiosity (lower computational complexity, can simulate non-diffuse interreflections). I haven't tried photon mapping, though.
I meant that the ant language itself is a sort of contrived assembly (although its really at a lower level - you can't save data in the normal sense of sticking numbers in memory locations like you can in assembly). Programming directly in the ant language is similar to programming in assembly (though I suspect most teams built a compiler or preprocessor of some sort).
This is a bit of a digression, but I'd like to point out that not only is assembly useful to implement games, it can be a game in itself: 7th anual International Functional Programming Contest, CoreWars (though I don't expect them to displace the market share of UT2004)
Slashdot Mirror
Open source software is also an instrument of social change - improving the linux kernel empowers the masses in addition to having a direct effect on other people being able to get their work done. This is a significant motivating factor for a lot of people, and is one reason why Linux is popular and Minix is not.
Wireless networking is also an instrument of social change - it allows people to communicate directly with each other without having to rely on third party infrastructure. Unfortunately, ham radio has too many restrictions to enable this sort of social change, so it's happening in the unlicensed spectrum (see the personal telco project for one of many example).
-jim
I think you have a bit too much faith in 802.11 if you think it's a drop-in replacement for a ham radio. I have used 802.11 at five miles with 24db antennas and direct line of sight. I wish there was a happy medium - I can either use high-throughput 35mw radios that go a few miles at best, but I can do anything I want with them, or I can (as soon as I get my license) use 1500 watt radios that can bounce signals off the moon (not that I plan to try this right away...), but I can't use them for anything useful unless its an emergency. Maybe the FCC will open up some more unlicensed spectrum, but I'm not holding my breath.
Why do people talk over ham radio if they already have a telephone?
Soldering is not that interesting. Creating new routing protocols is. With a good routing protocol, a wireless network can use spectrum more efficiently and support more users. Communicating with people on the other side of the planet directly, without repeaters, does not scale well. Secure routing requires (at minimum) digital signatures (which, according to other posts, are permissible, since they don't obscure the meaning of the communication), or else a malicious user can bring down the whole network by advertising bogus routes.
Being aware of and following the rules is what is required. Agreeing with them is not. I'm willing to concede that they may be a necessary evil.
-jim
Maybe an acceptable compromise would be to allow encryption and/or commercial use, but only for digital communication methods that don't use much bandwidth (such as PSK31). That way, the people who want encrypted email or ssh from the boonies, and want it bad enough that they'll get a license and live with low speeds, can have it without clogging the spectrum.
-jim
Coincidentally, I'm actually planning to take my technician's license test this weekend.
As an outsider, it seems to me that there's a connection between the lack of popularity of ham radio and the severe restrictions placed on what can be done with it.
For instance: sure, I can check my email over ham radio, but I'm not allowed to use encryption. So, to check my email I have to either a)broadcast my IMAP password to everyone within hundreds of miles, or b)disable passwords altogether and leave my mail account wide open.
Neither of these options seem very appealling, In the networking community, cryptography is seen as a great thing.
What do most ham operators think of these kinds of restrictions (no crypto, no music, no commercial traffic)? Do you like having the openness that a no-crypto policy implies, or do you prefer to keep the airwaves uncluttered by non-ham radio related personal/commercial traffic, or do you all grumble at the FCCs outdated restrictions?
-jim
Interesting. Any guesses how they compare in terms of power output and efficiency?
-jim
The Jargon File comes to mind. I owe quite a bit of my knowledge of computer history to its print form, the New Hacker's Dictionary.
He also brought us the infamous Aunt Tillie Builds a Kernel lkml thread.
-jim
The article vaguely implied that maybe flexibility and durability was the issue. It also mentioned puting a pattern of little holes in the fiber. Does anyone know what those are for?
-jim
It's also described in one of their research papers.
Link to patent.
-jim
In my opinion, Google's market dominance has more to do with massive computing and network resources than technology. (Their reputation of being not evil doesn't hurt, either.)
Their architecture is relatively well-understood. If you want to know how google works, read The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, and some of the other papers from Google. (They probably have some special tricks they haven't revealed to the public, but the basic algorithms aren't that complicated.)
It's hard for anyone to compete with Google without having enough bandwidth to crawl a large portion of the web on a regular basis, and then store the resulting data structures in RAM.
-jim
It seems to me that the most reasonable solution would be to design a sealed-case hydrogen fuel cell with three compartments, one for water, one for hydrogen, and one for oxygen (if the gasses have to be stored separately-I'm not sure). When all the hydrogen and oxygen have been converted to water, you plug it in, and the water is split back into oxygen and hydrogen by electrolysis.
Has anyone built such a device? Are they impractical for some reason (too large, too heavy, too expensive, difficult to manufacture, etc...)?
-jim
I post to slashdot and recently have run into a slew of frustrations trying to get my posts modded up. For instance, one really frustrating thing is, moderators slap me with a -1 when they encounter something that might be confusing to them in the post. They take it as a negative, when really a very simple follow up post from the author would clear it up. After all, its the revevance of the content, not 1337 3ngr15h skillz that is being moderated.
What are some of the frustrations you have come across when posting to slashdot, and have you any ideas on how to improve on the moderation process?
Another really frustrating point is many people feel that some posts get an automatic +2 on the basis excellent karma, not purely on the merit of the post itself (i.e., the burden of originality is lessened for established slashdotters), while the opposite is true for posters with bad karma or a high account number (i.e., the burden of proof for creative posts may be higher, sometimes unreasonably so).
One's list of friends and fans also helps, to a certain extent (if you are a friend of a slashdot Rock Star, you are more likely to get modded up).
In the examples above, a follow-up anonymous coward post by the reviewer might solve this particular problem (lest the reviewer lose the ability to moderate by posting with his regular account); also, I think that if the identities of the moderators are protected, why not the authors? Perhaps a solution to my second issue would be to have the author's names hidden from anyone with mod points (as in metamoderation).
-jim
I've played go a little bit myself, but I'm not very good at it. For a game with so few rules, it's surprisingly complicated. Here's more information if you're interested in learning about the game, and here's a more in-depth explaination of the rules.
-jim
I couldn't help but notice the following were listed as "losers":
John Kerry
George Bush
Tony Blair
Abu Ghraib
-jim
This is what worries me. With wireless networking, it is possible to build free community networks that span large distances and don't rely on rented infrastructure (phone lines, cable, etc...), except for uplink to the rest of the internet. (For an example of what such a network would look like, check out roofnet)
If a commercial provider can provide "good enough" service for cheap, it removes part of the incentive to create high quality community networks that are free.
-jim
David Cohen-Steiner, Pierre Alliez, and Mathieu Desbrun
To appear, ACM SIGGRAPH '04.
Abstract: Achieving efficiency in mesh processing often demands that overly verbose 3D datasets be reduced to more concise, yet faithful representations. Despite numerous applications ranging from geometry compression to reverse engineering, concisely capturing the geometry of a surface remains a tedious task. In this paper, we present both theoretical and practical contributions that result in a novel and versatile framework for geometric approximation of surfaces. We depart from the usual strategy by casting shape approximation as a variational geometric partitioning problem. Using the concept of geometric proxies, we drive the distortion error down through repeated clustering of faces into best-fitting regions. Our approach is entirely discrete and error-driven, and does not require parameterization or local estimations of differential quantities. We also introduce a new metric based on normal deviation, and demonstrate its superior behavior at capturing anisotropy.
The actual paper can be dowloaded from here.
-jim
Take a look at this article at Linux Weekly News
-jim
Besides user convenience, one of the benefits of wireless networks (particularly long-range wireless) is that they can compete directly with DSL, Cable modem, and landline phone service. My parents live out in the country on a hill about five miles from the nearest large town (McMinnville, OR). They have fast internet service thanks to a reasonably forward-looking ISP who set up a wireless network using radios from waverider. Unfortunately, the waverider site doesn't list prices anymore (I believe they used to sell an access point and five client radio modems for about $5000 or so, and additional radios were about $400). It uses the 902-928 mhz ISM band, so there's no FCC license required, and the line-of-sight requirements aren't as strict as 802.11. Once 802.16 (wimax) gets established, similar performing, cheaper, non-proprietary radios may become available.
This is a great way to compete with cable modem and DSL without needing to deploy much infrustructure. Any well-motivated party can set up one of these networks. It may also compel landline internet providers to offer higher throughput and better service, which is good for everyone.
-jim
Not everyone uses the internet solely for instant messaging, email, and web browsing. I would love to be able to download linux ISOs from whoever in the neighborhood got them first, rather than fighting over the mirrors. Other large files could be shared as well. Use your imagination.
-jim
I could see an ISP maybe offering 200mbps speeds between customers of the same ISP in the same city, as an incentive for customers to convince all their friends to join. It doesn't cost them anything if their customers are just using spare capacity on the local loop. Of course, the upload is probably a lot less than 200mbps, and if multiple ISPs offered the same service, it wouldn't take long before some enterprising customer would sign up for both and run a gateway between the two (not that that would harm anything, but the ISPs probably wouldn't like it).
-jim
I already mentioned this in another post, but these people created a ray tracer with non-instantaneous values of c, like 1m/s. They have a few interesting animations on their site that simulate doppler shift and some of the relativistic effects that occur when travelling at speeds approaching c.
-jim
I know you're joking, but these people really did make a ray tracer where you can change the value of c. They have a few animations where they set the speed of light to small values like 1m/s.
-jim
Pov-ray can do soft shadows by doing shadow ray tests at every point sampled, with the light source moved slightly at each sample. It also can compute global illumination using a radiosity-like algorithm (they call it radiosity, but I'm not sure it's a true radiosity algorithm, path tracing perhaps?) They also have photon mapping, which is in many ways superior to radiosity (lower computational complexity, can simulate non-diffuse interreflections). I haven't tried photon mapping, though.
Radiosity
Area Lights
Photons
-jim
I meant that the ant language itself is a sort of contrived assembly (although its really at a lower level - you can't save data in the normal sense of sticking numbers in memory locations like you can in assembly). Programming directly in the ant language is similar to programming in assembly (though I suspect most teams built a compiler or preprocessor of some sort).
-jim
This is a bit of a digression, but I'd like to point out that not only is assembly useful to implement games, it can be a game in itself: 7th anual International Functional Programming Contest, CoreWars (though I don't expect them to displace the market share of UT2004)
-jim