Comeon slashdot, can we get a rumor? anything? What were the terms of this agreement? Will mp3.com pay the RIAA (ie, they caved in) or will they be allowed to redistribute music on the mymp3.com ? Do we have to switch to some kind of proprietary WMF thing? DETAILS! I NEED DETAILS! I'm dying over here aaaaahh!:)
Please note: by powering on this computer you agree to abide by the licensing terms of DOS 3.3
Common practice today, any computer you buy will have a sticker like this on it. So there is NO opportunity to request a refund for the unused software, or otherwise disagree with the license and opt not to use the software if you want to use the computer. How fair is that?
Why would you want to use a regulated communications medium which makes it impossible to do anything useful without paying a fortune when you can use a laser?
Sure, if they're acidic enough anything's possible. The problem is the tracking and retrieval system.. processing is secondary. The other problem is, of course, waste disposal. Unfortunately an efficient Cricket-to-energy converter does not yet exist, so you can expect to require waste extraction...
Please people, every time a flaw is found in Linux, people shout "Linux is not secure!" and when its in NT, we hear "NT sux. Linux rules" and similar for other OS's. Stop it.
I reserve the right, however, to claim that linux will patch something and put it out for download within a DAY of the exploit being made public. At best, hotfixes take a week, with the "It's stable, you can use it on production machines" signoff (that would be the service pack) taking several months.
Maybe they aren't any more secure compared to each other.. but one fixes bugs fast and the other doesn't. Which would you rather have?
Let the big corporations duke it out. Turn the legal system into a way of carrying on feudalistic wars and we'll all be on more level ground. What I mean is, that money will go towards attacking each other.. instead of exploiting the consumer. This will have the beneficial effect of forcing competition between them as the war expands into the marketplace.
Flouescent lights, refridgerator, space heaters, air conditioner, microwave oven... got em all.
Yeah, but your house does 250 amps, I bet.. the building I'm sitting in right now I betcha does over 2000. That, umm, kinda makes a difference.:)
I don't string my cat5 anywhere NEAR my power cables
You can do that all day long if you run them at 90 degree angles relative to each other - that way you get minimal interference between them. Worse though is leaving them all coiled up - inductance can cause some serious problems over long lengths of cable.. like what you might find behind a patch panel.
We'll have inferior bandwidth at home, subject to all the power line noise you described. And don't expect the house to be sold/built any cheaper for the lack of a real cat5 network either.
I already resolved, like many of my geek friends, to live only in neighborhoods with high speed options available.. they'll come around - it is all a matter of market demand and as people become clued about this it'll become alot more prevalent.
I said maximum safe current.. 30 mA is the threshold for lethality for a cross-body shock, but I'm not an expert on this... I just recall that from reading a book on applied math with electronics and it had a little chart in it with a cute symbol labelled "You" as part of the circuit and a lightbulb for your head.
Obviously putting your finger across an electrode while you are ungrounded would have significantly less impact than a finger from each hand and putting the charge across the heart.
btw - don't let that "funny feeling" last too long.. internal / RF burns suck. REALLY suck. No, no, I don't think you understand: THEY ARE THE MOST PAINFUL THING YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.
Except that when you are being electrocuted, even with a low, non-fatal current, the longer you are exposed to the current, the more the resistance of your body drops so the more current flows through you.
That may be due to the capacitive effect the body has, but I doubt it would have a significant impact. Besides, by the time you start pumping serious amperage through someone they're already dead.. so capacitance doesn't mean much now does it?:)
'tis true that mineral water is a good dielectic. Unfortunately it is not suitable for use in electronics as it is very acidic and will eat away your PCBs and stuff. Worse, the acidic nature of it will eat away the plastic in many electronics which will either destroy it (like if it is a capacitor) or change its electrical characteristics. The worst part about this though is that that newly dislodged plastic floating around in the dielectric will create INCREDIBLE static charges. 3M has some very good low viscocity dialectrics which are very cool.. they are made out of strings of florocarbons IIRC, and I suspect they have some which don't do stupid things like eat electronics.:)
The biggest problem I can see with this system is that, unlike the slow old systems, this one is into radio frequencies (4-20MHz), which must surely cause problems for something.
Every frequency across the board will have problems because the transmission lines are so long. The trick is lowering the output to the point where the FCC doesn't complain, and maybe making it broad-spectrum... considering this is only feasible for home use we're talking maybe 1/8 watt transmission.. it's not like it has to go very far!
the max. current that would flow from a 9V battery through me is 6 microamps
Assuming you're wearing rubber-soled shoes and are dry. Obviously if you get out of a shower and hook yourself up to a 9V battery you'll be in for a suprise.:}
Noise isn't a function of the frequency or modulation.
Yeah, but I was saying if you want to dampen a signal with a cap, the frequency has an impact on the capacitive reactance of the cap.. sorry, perhaps that wasn't clear 'nuff..
The supply and cap would be fighting each other, hence a recreation of the big bang.
If you're stupid enough to not to properly rate it.. or use an electrolytic on it! Otherwise, all it does is create resistance in the circuit.. I was thinking of something like a tank circuit / band pass with the capacitor to have the lowest impedance at 60hz. Presumably the frequencies you want to block are in the Mhz range, and hence would be highly attenduated through the circuit!
Quite how this system works in conjunction with UPS's, though, is the interesting question...
When a UPS detects a drop in the line voltage, it usually trips a relay inside it.. hence your UPS will never "bleed" energy back into the lines..
Compare it to water, and think of volts as volume and amps as velocity.
Well, that's ass-backwards, but yeah. Voltage is actually the electrical pressure - rather like kinetic energy, whereas amperage is the actual movement of electrons.
It's the volts that jolts but the mills that kills
A simple application of ohms law will yield the maximum safe voltage. Ohms law is E=I/R, or voltage = amps * resistance...
So, we know most people's skin, when dry, has a resistance of about 1.5k if they are NOT grounded. If they are wet and grounded.. well.. let's just say they have about as much resistance as a hunk of 4ga wire. Anyway.. plug this into the formula...
E = 0.005 * 1500
.. which yields a voltage of: 7.5
That is your maximum "safe" DC voltage. This means that anything under 7.5 volts you can sneeze at without worries.:)
Not very well. At best it is essentially a massive hub. At 1.5MB/s, that means that you will never break 700k/s with more than a couple nodes chatting.. just like you would with any other half-duplex hub.
How many nodes will we be able to have on a single circuit?
I'd peg it at 5, tops.. and that's optimistic.
How well will it deal with electrically noisy circuits?
That is a function of the frequency and the modulation.. I cannot answer that.. however I would assume the error rate would be fairly low - maybe 1 per 10^9 ?
Will it be possible to isolate my network from my neighbor's?
Practically speaking, no. You can use different frequencies, of course, but the signal still gets there. A sufficiently large capacitor could remove enough of the signal.. but without knowing the frequency I can't tell you what size cap you'd need!
Your title is a most accurate indicator of the intelligence of the content within. By their very nature games are not and should not be taken seriously - they are played to GET AWAY from reality! It is an oxymoron - it's like saying "Microsoft Works"...
'tis important that people note this is for home networking, not for general distribution between an ISP and your home.
The reason that an ISP->user connection will never be feasible across powerlines is due to transformers - the moment you put a signal through a transformer you get garbage out the other end.. that's the downside of transformers - and why you can't use load coils with xDSL. The second problem I see with this is that because of the high voltages involved, it is quite possible to kill yourself.. well, the voltages don't kill, but use alittle ohms law and you'll figure out why high voltages are a problem (for reference, your body is about a 1.5k resistor and your max safe current is 5mA with lethal at 30mA).. anyway.
I also think the technology will be limited SOLELY to the home market - if I was IT manager I wouldn't let my company even *think* about deploying it.. you have all kinds of nasty things in commercial/industrial settings on those wires that just make it totally unreliable - a blown circuit breaker takes out your network, phase shift from flipping on the refridgerator, all those flourescent lights severely throw the phase out of whack - you're left with anything *but* clean energy in a commercial setting.. this is why power strips are so VERY VERY VERY VERY important.. and UPS' on anything worth a damn.
So, uhh, don't expect this to be any kind of "long term" tech - it'll be around for about 10 years tops.. most new buildings these days have cat5 and coax drops just per default.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft would be proud - now they can legitimately claim that bugs are features.
Comeon slashdot, can we get a rumor? anything? What were the terms of this agreement? Will mp3.com pay the RIAA (ie, they caved in) or will they be allowed to redistribute music on the mymp3.com ? Do we have to switch to some kind of proprietary WMF thing? DETAILS! I NEED DETAILS! I'm dying over here aaaaahh! :)
Please note: by powering on this computer you agree to abide by the licensing terms of DOS 3.3
Common practice today, any computer you buy will have a sticker like this on it. So there is NO opportunity to request a refund for the unused software, or otherwise disagree with the license and opt not to use the software if you want to use the computer. How fair is that?
Why would you want to use a regulated communications medium which makes it impossible to do anything useful without paying a fortune when you can use a laser?
Hey, Jon.. not to be rude or anything, but, umm, have you ever played the game?
I reserve the right, however, to claim that linux will patch something and put it out for download within a DAY of the exploit being made public. At best, hotfixes take a week, with the "It's stable, you can use it on production machines" signoff (that would be the service pack) taking several months.
Maybe they aren't any more secure compared to each other.. but one fixes bugs fast and the other doesn't. Which would you rather have?
"This company has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact your vendor or appeal to a higher court."
Gee.. they basically bypassed the transformer using an optocoupler and a pair of bandpass filters Yippie.. that's definately patentable. *groan*
Hey, I LIKE that idea..
Go C|net!
E-mail me and I'll prove it, provided you agree to keep the e-mail in confidence.
Yeah, but your house does 250 amps, I bet.. the building I'm sitting in right now I betcha does over 2000. That, umm, kinda makes a difference. :)
I don't string my cat5 anywhere NEAR my power cables
You can do that all day long if you run them at 90 degree angles relative to each other - that way you get minimal interference between them. Worse though is leaving them all coiled up - inductance can cause some serious problems over long lengths of cable.. like what you might find behind a patch panel.
We'll have inferior bandwidth at home, subject to all the power line noise you described. And don't expect the house to be sold/built any cheaper for the lack of a real cat5 network either.
I already resolved, like many of my geek friends, to live only in neighborhoods with high speed options available.. they'll come around - it is all a matter of market demand and as people become clued about this it'll become alot more prevalent.
Obviously putting your finger across an electrode while you are ungrounded would have significantly less impact than a finger from each hand and putting the charge across the heart.
btw - don't let that "funny feeling" last too long.. internal / RF burns suck. REALLY suck. No, no, I don't think you understand: THEY ARE THE MOST PAINFUL THING YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.
That may be due to the capacitive effect the body has, but I doubt it would have a significant impact. Besides, by the time you start pumping serious amperage through someone they're already dead.. so capacitance doesn't mean much now does it? :)
Bah, that's an easy experiment.. simply show the the normals how we really work.
Every frequency across the board will have problems because the transmission lines are so long. The trick is lowering the output to the point where the FCC doesn't complain, and maybe making it broad-spectrum... considering this is only feasible for home use we're talking maybe 1/8 watt transmission.. it's not like it has to go very far!
Assuming you're wearing rubber-soled shoes and are dry. Obviously if you get out of a shower and hook yourself up to a 9V battery you'll be in for a suprise. :}
Noise isn't a function of the frequency or modulation.
Yeah, but I was saying if you want to dampen a signal with a cap, the frequency has an impact on the capacitive reactance of the cap.. sorry, perhaps that wasn't clear 'nuff..
The supply and cap would be fighting each other, hence a recreation of the big bang.
If you're stupid enough to not to properly rate it.. or use an electrolytic on it! Otherwise, all it does is create resistance in the circuit.. I was thinking of something like a tank circuit / band pass with the capacitor to have the lowest impedance at 60hz. Presumably the frequencies you want to block are in the Mhz range, and hence would be highly attenduated through the circuit!
Quite how this system works in conjunction with UPS's, though, is the interesting question...
When a UPS detects a drop in the line voltage, it usually trips a relay inside it .. hence your UPS will never "bleed" energy back into the lines..
Well, that's ass-backwards, but yeah. Voltage is actually the electrical pressure - rather like kinetic energy, whereas amperage is the actual movement of electrons.
It's the volts that jolts but the mills that kills
A simple application of ohms law will yield the maximum safe voltage. Ohms law is E=I/R, or voltage = amps * resistance...
So, we know most people's skin, when dry, has a resistance of about 1.5k if they are NOT grounded. If they are wet and grounded.. well.. let's just say they have about as much resistance as a hunk of 4ga wire. Anyway.. plug this into the formula...
E = 0.005 * 1500
.. which yields a voltage of: 7.5
That is your maximum "safe" DC voltage. This means that anything under 7.5 volts you can sneeze at without worries. :)
Not very well. At best it is essentially a massive hub. At 1.5MB/s, that means that you will never break 700k/s with more than a couple nodes chatting.. just like you would with any other half-duplex hub.
How many nodes will we be able to have on a single circuit?
I'd peg it at 5, tops.. and that's optimistic.
How well will it deal with electrically noisy circuits?
That is a function of the frequency and the modulation.. I cannot answer that.. however I would assume the error rate would be fairly low - maybe 1 per 10^9 ?
Will it be possible to isolate my network from my neighbor's?
Practically speaking, no. You can use different frequencies, of course, but the signal still gets there. A sufficiently large capacitor could remove enough of the signal.. but without knowing the frequency I can't tell you what size cap you'd need!
Sure.. but I think you'll be getting messages from God before you decrypt the signals...
Your title is a most accurate indicator of the intelligence of the content within. By their very nature games are not and should not be taken seriously - they are played to GET AWAY from reality! It is an oxymoron - it's like saying "Microsoft Works"...
The reason that an ISP->user connection will never be feasible across powerlines is due to transformers - the moment you put a signal through a transformer you get garbage out the other end.. that's the downside of transformers - and why you can't use load coils with xDSL. The second problem I see with this is that because of the high voltages involved, it is quite possible to kill yourself.. well, the voltages don't kill, but use alittle ohms law and you'll figure out why high voltages are a problem (for reference, your body is about a 1.5k resistor and your max safe current is 5mA with lethal at 30mA).. anyway.
I also think the technology will be limited SOLELY to the home market - if I was IT manager I wouldn't let my company even *think* about deploying it.. you have all kinds of nasty things in commercial/industrial settings on those wires that just make it totally unreliable - a blown circuit breaker takes out your network, phase shift from flipping on the refridgerator, all those flourescent lights severely throw the phase out of whack - you're left with anything *but* clean energy in a commercial setting.. this is why power strips are so VERY VERY VERY VERY important.. and UPS' on anything worth a damn.
So, uhh, don't expect this to be any kind of "long term" tech - it'll be around for about 10 years tops.. most new buildings these days have cat5 and coax drops just per default.