94070337
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
The red cross has asked for 50 ham radio operators to fly to Puerto Rico and be deployed there for up to three weeks. This is unprecedented in the 75-year cooperation between Red Cross and ARRL, the national organization of ham radio operators for the U.S. The operators will relay health-and-welfare messages and provide communications links where those are missing and are essential to rescue and recovery. With much infrastructure destroyed, short-wave radio is a critical means of communicating from Puerto Rico to the Mainland at this time.
91432573
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
There's been a lot of confusion about the recentArtifex v. Hancomcase, in which the court found that the GPL was an enforceable contract. I'm going to try to explain the whole thing in clear terms for the legal layman.
91432415
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
There's been a lot of confusion about the recent Artifex v. Hancom case, in which the court found that the GPL was an enforceable contract. I'm going to try to explain the whole thing in clear terms for the legal layman.
89234005
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
MariaDB is releasing MaxScale 2.1, a new version of their database routing proxy, and has modified its timed-transition-to-Open-Source Business Source License to make it more acceptable to the Open Source community and more easily usable by other companies. I've blogged the issues I had with the license and how MariaDB has fixed them, and Kaj Arno has blogged the MariaDB side of the story.
88618719
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
How will we buy self-driving cars, and how will we keep them running as self-driving software and hardware becomes obsolete much more rapidly than the vehicle itself? Boalt Hall legal professor Lothar Determann and Open Source Evangelist Bruce Perens are publishing an article in the prestigious Berkeley Technology Law Journal on how the law and markets might support an aftermarket for self-driving computers, rather than having the manufacturer lock them down or sell driving as a service rather than selling cars. The preprint is available to read now, and discusses how an Open Car, based on Open Standards and an Open Market, but not necessarily Open Source, can drive prices down and quality up over non-competitive manufacturer lock-in.
88526373
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
David Rowe VK5DGR has been working on ultra-low-bandwidth digital voice codecs for years, and his latest quest has been to come up with a digital codec that would compete well with single-sideband modulation used by ham contesters to score the longest-distance communications using HF radio. A new codec records clear, but not hi-fi, voice in 700 bits per second, that's 88 bytes per second. Connected to an already-existing Open Source digital modem, it might beat SSB.
Obviously there are other uses for recording voice at ultra-low-bandwidth. Many smartphones could record your voice for your entire life using their existing storage. A single IP packet could carry 15 seconds of speech. Ultra-low-bandwidth codecs don't help conventional VoIP, though. The payload size for low-latency voice is only a few bytes, and the packet overhead will be at least 10 times that size.
88526343
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
David Rowe VK5DGR has been working on ultra-low-bandwidth digital voice codecs for years, and his latest quest has been to come up with a digital codec that would compete well with single-sideband modulation used by ham contesters to score the longest-distance communications using HF radio. A new codec records clear, but not hi-fi, voice in 700 bits per second, that's 88 bytes per second. Connected to an already-existing Open Source digital modem, it might beat SSB.
Obviously there are other uses for recording voice at ultra-low-bandwidth. Many smartphones could record your voice for your entire life using their existing storage. A single IP packet could carry 15 seconds of speech. Ultra-low-bandwidth codecs don't help conventional VoIP, though. The payload size for low-latency voice is only a few bytes, and the packet overhead will be at least 10 times that size.
88307889
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
A rocket launch is an awesome thing to see. The SpaceX Falcon 9, carrying 10 Iridium satellites, is expected to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, an easy (if somewhat tedious) drive from the San Francisco Bay Area, on Sunday, January 8. There's a chance, of course, that you won't see the launch, as launches frequently scrub and reschedule, etc. My success record is about 1 in 3 so far. But you can join me in trying to see the SpaceX Falcon 9 return to flight this Sunday by following these instructions.
87689301
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
Silicon Valley folks should, sometime, take the opportunity to view a launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lompoc is 4-5 hours from the Bay, 2.5 hours from LA if there's ever no traffic. An upcoming SpaceX launch is notable because it's their return to flight, months after their last attempt blew up on the pad during a pre-launch test. Read how to view the launch.
86237777
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
A fire at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast, currently over 10,000 acres in size, has approached the pads used by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. No structures have been damaged, but power lines have been destroyed. There is about 1000 feet of firebreak around each pad, but the presence of smoke and the absence of electrical power is potentially a problem for rockets, payloads, and ground-support equipment. The WorldView 4 satellite and a Delta 4, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 with at least 7 and potentially 11 Iridium satellites are known to be on site. Ground support equipment at the base constitutes the United States only access to polar orbit for large rockets without overflying populated areas. Liquid oxygen stored on the site may already have been released as a precaution or boiled off, and there are large supplies of rocket fuel, but these have so far not been at hazard.
The Soberanes fire near Big Sur, 180 miles farther South on the California coast, has gone on for two months, burning 185 square miles and costing over 200 Million dollars to fight with no end in sight. Obviously, it's dry out there.
85790837
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
The nighttime launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 containing Iridium satellites at 9:49 PM PST Monday September 19th from Vandenberg AFB SLC-4 is likely to be visible across California and in some Nevada locations. Although Vandenberg has a landing pad for the Falcon under construction, this will probably be a drone-ship landing and some California observers might see two of the landing burns.
84477425
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
Tesla has announced the first known fatality while using autopilot. Neither Autopilot nor the driver saw a white trailer side against a brightly-lit sky as a trailer turned into the path of the Tesla on a divided highway. Due to the trailer's wheel height, the Tesla hit the trailer windshield-first.
The interesting thing about this is that it would probably not have happened with a Google car, because Google makes use of radar that can see above the base of the windshield (probably critical in this case), and can identify pedestrians, bicycles, and other vehicles even through foliage and beyond the usual eyepoints of a human driver.
My impression is that Elon Musk has rejected a google-style radar as impractical mainly based upon it's appearance (it's a spinning cylinder atop the roof of the car). It might be time for Musk and Tesla to re-assess the practical sensor kit required for autopilot.
Tesla makes the point that this is only an investigation, and that the known death toll of Autopilot so far is lower than that for conventional automobiles.
83495685
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
The "AFCI" breaker is a relatively new kind which detects hidden electrical sparks from poor series electrical connections, by receiving high electrical frequencies that electrical arcing emits. Such sparks can eventually cause a fire. In looking for one on the Home Depot site, I came upon this device, with a review from a customer who returned the breaker because it trips every week or two on their lighting circuit. This indicates exactly the problem the device is meant to catch.
Because there was no way to feed back to the reviewer, I wrote a second review with some safety advice, hoping to inform the next person to come by. But Home Depot rejected it, because it did not specifically discuss the product.
Of course we can't cure all of the world's fire hazards. But it's nice to point out a problem when you see one, lest some poor sap's home burn down. But this is difficult to do when staff at the vendor and its web site don't have a clue. Maybe some publicity on Slashdot will help.
82278941
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
This Washington Post story says that political policy changes aimed at reducing carbon emissions and economic change due to the availability of affordable less-carbon-emitting energy sources is working to reduce carbon emissions:The IEA attributed the second straight year of decoupled growth and emissions to a greater uptake of renewable energy, particularly wind, and fewer emissions in China and the United States, the two largest emitters by far. The former country is cutting back its coal use deliberately, while in the U.S., market forces have had a similar effect, as cheap natural gas has pushed out a considerable volume of coal in electricity generation.
81535987
submission
Bruce Perens writes:
I'm endorsing Bernie Sanders because of what I've learned from Open Source.
