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Comment: The catch is... (Score 4, Informative) 128

by toejam13 (#43707265) Attached to: Samsung Testing 5G Phones With 1gbps Download Speed

The second article notes that the 5G tests are being conducted on the 28GHz Ka microwave band. They also note that they're using a 64 element antenna array.

While those upper microwave bands are great in that you can get very wide channels (possibly hundreds of megahertz wide), their downfall is that they are incredibly line of sight restricted. This is compounded by significant atmospheric absorption. That's why many broadcasters on the band tend to use highly directional antennas. For omnidirectional use, you're going to have to deploy a lot of picocells.

Also for their tests, are they using the large number of antennas for MIMO beamforming (additive RF amplification), MIMO spacial multiplexing (parallel RF feeds slightly out of phase of each other) or old fashioned directional transmission (or a combi of all three?). How much additional cost is that? Even with fractal antennas on short wavelengths, how many of them can you fit in a handset?

Comment: Re:"But they gave us a LOT of money" replies ICANN (Score 4, Insightful) 114

by toejam13 (#43139589) Attached to: Amazon's Quest For Web Names Draws Foes

Did YOU give us a shitload of money?

That's clearly what this boils down to. This massive free-form expansion of TLDs is little more than a revenue generation scheme by ICANN. So the same sort of wild-west name grabs we saw with .com domain names will simply be repeated here, just on a larger scale.

I'm sure that all of the new issues of domain squatting and trademark conflicts with/within these new TLDs will be addressed by ICANN, that is if you can get them to stop rolling around in their piles of money for a minute.

Comment: Re:Like healthy citarettes (Score 1) 365

by toejam13 (#42975237) Attached to: New Process Takes Energy From Coal Without Burning It

I'm no expert on coal power plants but I'm pretty sure we already do that with scrubbers.

Scrubbers are typically only required for new plants. Existing plants have very liberal grandfather policies that exempt them. So many companies will simply upgrade existing facilities to keep the grandfather clause. It isn't unlike tearing down a house, save for one wall, then building a new house and then saying it is a 100 year-old house.

 

Maybe not on the horizon but there is certainly something that has been around for 50+ years that could replace coal overnight. It's called nuclear power.

Traditional nuclear power facilities are expensive. Not to mention that you have to build them in the Styx to appease the NIMBY folks, so you suffer a lot of transmission losses. Thorium reactors might offer a solution. Same with micro reactors that can use a sealed fuel container shipped from a factory. But GE and Westinghouse are still pushing for their latest super-sized traditional reactors.

Comment: Re:Scaling is the Key! (Score 3, Informative) 365

by toejam13 (#42975039) Attached to: New Process Takes Energy From Coal Without Burning It

It isn't expensive when all of the senators and representatives from coal burning states insert major tax credits (read: corporate welfare) into bills to pay for such boondoggles. Eventually, such things get passed and we all pay for it.

You should read up on how the federal government subsidies coal liquefaction. It is a complete and total scam.

Comment: Re:Like healthy citarettes (Score 2) 365

by toejam13 (#42975005) Attached to: New Process Takes Energy From Coal Without Burning It

Except that the United States has the benefit of cheap methane (CNG). Regionally, you also have cheap hydro in the NW and TV, cheap wind in the upper prairie states and cheap solar in the sun belt.

Coal is only cheap when you exclude the environmental and related health costs. The heavy and radioactive metals expelled as particulate matter are a major source of cancer. The nitrogen oxides expelled are a major contributor to acid rain. People are sorta forgetting those issues in the whole CO2 debate. Last I checked, chemotherapy wasn't cheap.

And many areas in the US have restrictions on wood burning. Unless you're talking about a pellet stove with catalytic converter which is fairly darn clean as far as burnin' wood goes as is often exempt from burn restrictions.

Comment: Re:Probably not native binaries on ARM (Score 1) 107

by toejam13 (#42792435) Attached to: Windows Software Coming To Android Via Wine

So instead of WINE the environment emulator, the article is talking about WINE's less talked about feature, WinAPI emulation via a shared library (not unlike nt2unix, windu or Willows Twin).

I've actually used products like this before. It isn't much different than using libC instead of the native OS API. It makes porting from Windows to Unix so much easier. The only performance cost is the thunk to the emulated API. But if you want to port your Windows app to a big iron server (POWER or Sparc), it is the way to go.

Comment: Re:Wrong (Score 1) 307

by toejam13 (#42721645) Attached to: How Proxied Torrents Could End ISP Subpoenas

If proxy services are classified as service providers, expect that laws regarding logging and auditing be ramped up

With some fairly basic mixmaster techniques that will be useless as you can't tell which data belongs to which encrypted stream.

That has more to do with avoiding detection in the case of private proxy mesh networks.

If you were running a proxy service open to the public, such techniques would turn up during an audit and would result in revocation of your service provider status. The government could then hold you liable for the content passing across your mesh. They could then test the quality of your whitelists/blacklists by attempting to use your public proxy to access illegal content and then fine/charge you as they deem fit.

Even in the case of private proxy meshes, all the government would need to do is discover a leaf. They could then hit all nodes talking to that leaf, especially if they discover the leaf in the middle of an illegal transaction or are able to replicate the transaction. They might not be able to get the destination, but they can pick off the internodals in an attempt to discouraging others from doing the same.

You will have to outlaw it

You don't need to ban it completely, which would probably be unconstitutional in a number of countries anyway. Instead, give them the choice of instituting a clear chain of client+destination or require strict monitoring of illegal content, which generally does not enjoy constitutional protections.

Comment: Re:Wrong (Score 2) 307

by toejam13 (#42718527) Attached to: How Proxied Torrents Could End ISP Subpoenas

That's what I wonder. If proxy services are not classified as service providers, the government could in theory come after you for conspiracy or possibly RICO statutes.

If proxy services are classified as service providers, expect that laws regarding logging and auditing be ramped up. Every TCP connection you make will be saved and stored for a long time. Even if you bounce across seven proxies, the logs will eventually point back to the client. They could easily require little more than an administrative subpoena to get those logs, too.

My worry is that in their effort to trace pirates using back channel methods, the government is going to obtain very powerful methods to track you. And we're going to pay for it out of our own pockets.

Comment: Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score 1) 245

by toejam13 (#42237717) Attached to: FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50%

Not only have I used BSD, but I'd say that it shaped my adult life.

As a teen, I signed up for a UNIX timeshare service that utilized a Sun SPARCstation running SunOS 4 (4.3BSD based). You got a Csh and a T1 to the 'Net. When they started offering SLIP service, I installed AmiTCP, an Amiga port of the NetBSD network stack which also included many /bin commands and /etc conf files.

I eventually took the plunge and installed NetBSD 0.9 on my Amiga 3000. Later, it was FreeBSD 2.x on my 486/66. While most people in my university programming classes were using Turbo C, I was using GCC. Classmates took MFC/C++ as an elective, I took Perl. Friends were using IPX on their home network, I was using TCP/IP with a FreeBSD box acting as a dial-on-demand gateway.

Having so much networking experience, I drifted from the programming side of computers into networking. My experience with BSD eventually landed me a job with a networking startup that used an embedded *BSD OS as the base for their product. Since then, I've used BSD based gear from Citrix (Netscaler), F5 (BIG-IP, EDGE-FX and 3DNS), Nokia (IPSO Firewall) and Secure Computing (Sidewinder firewall) as part of my job. I've been at it for over 15 years.

I still use FreeBSD for development here at home. DragonFlyBSD is also nice, though I prefer Ports over Pkgsrc, which is why I stuck with FreeBSD.

Comment: Re:Why would you want to game on Linux (Score 2) 332

by toejam13 (#42218115) Attached to: Valve Begins Listing Linux Requirements For Certain Games On Steam

The migration to Linux goes beyond simply bringing games to a new platform. It could be seen as an attempt by Valve to diversify in light of Microsoft's and Apple's closed app store platforms.

In the future, Windows and MacOS may only allow you to install new software packages through their stores. They may allow a small number of third party stores to exist in order to prevent anti-trust accusations, but chances are that they'll demand a cut of all sales.

No such issues of power consolidation currently exist in the Linux desktop ecosystem. I don't think the culture would allow it. Just look at how their cousins over in the Android mobile sector deal with it - a few taps in the system settings and you're free to install all the apps from 3rd party sites you want.

Comment: Drop the $2 and the penny while you're at it (Score 1) 943

by toejam13 (#42148239) Attached to: Is It Time For the US To Ditch the Dollar Bill?

Dollar bills are horrible for vending machines. About half of the bills in my wallet are in questionable condition, and most aren't even a decade old. Meanwhile, I have have a couple of coins in my pocket that are from the 1950s and 60s. Still perfectly good.

The two dollar bill never really took off in the US. Supposedly some people find them unlucky. Dump 'em for a $2 coin. Works for Canada.

If you really want to get bold, move the currency from two decimal places to one (coins would be $0.1, $0.2 and $0.5). The penny has less real value today than the half-penny had in its day when it was dropped. Sure, we could just round to the nearest nickle to keep 5Â and 25Â pieces good, but we're almost to a point where it costs more to mint a nickle than what its face value is.

I'm not tense, just terribly, terribly alert!

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