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Wireless Networking

Submission + - SPAM: Beware the 802.11n power play

alphadogg writes: Next-generation 802.11n systems promise to considerably improve WLAN performance. But the processing required for the boost sucks up more power than the older 802.11a/b/g networks. Still, many enterprise-class Wi-Fi vendors claim to deliver full 802.11n capabilities without enterprise customers having to touch their power infrastructures. So what gives?
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GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Has anyone gotten the GPL code for the Samsung TVs 2

Daniel Lamblin writes: When I got my Samsung LN-T3242H 32" 720P LCD HD TV It came with a copy of the GPL, and a statement saying that some software used in the product is covered by the GPL and other software by LGPL. There was also a USB port on the back from which new firmware could be loaded. This excited me and I emailed the address specified with a request for the code, and anything they were willing to give as documentation with it. I believe the GPL specifies that there must be a usable way to build the source too. Well, two requests later, I had no reply. I emailed a Samsung engineer formerly involved in GPL related work, and he forwarded my request to the right people. It seemed. The last I heard, and they did try to keep me updated, was that they're getting it together for me, I should have it soon, and they need to talk to people in Monta Vista. This was in October. I got the TV in June and made requests starting then.

Apparently several, if not all, Samsung TV models have a reference to using some GPL code. This goes back about to 2005, maybe more. Has anyone's request for the source been honored? I understand maybe my TV has slightly different code, and they may be using a VCS to find the right branch, but it would make me feel better knowing that this isn't a black-hole and that someone's actually gotten some code out of Samsung regarding their TV using GPL & LGPL.

PS edit as needed.
Announcements

Submission + - New 4-quark particle discovered in Japan (www.kek.jp)

mu22le writes: "An international team of researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the "Belle collaboration"*1, recently announced the discovery of an exotic new sub-atomic particle with non-zero electric charge. This particle, which the researchers have named the Z(4430)*2, does not fit into the usual scheme of "mesons", combinations of a quark*3and an antiquark that are held together by the force of the strong interaction.

The Z(4430) particle was found in the decay products of B-mesons (mesons containing a "bottom" quark) that are produced in large numbers at the KEKB "B-factory", an electron-positron collider at the KEK laboratory. While investigating various decays of the B meson in a data sample containing about 660 million pairs of B and anti-B mesons, the Belle team observed 120 B mesons that decay into a Z(4430) and a K-meson. The Z(4430) then instantly decays into a "Psi-prime" (Psi-prime) particle and a pi-meson (see Figure-1). The Belle team found that this particle has the same electric charge as the electron and a mass about 4.7 times that of the proton.

In the past few years, a number of peculiar new particles, including the so-called X(3872), Y(4260), X(3940), Y(3940), have been found by the Belle and also by the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). These new particles lie in the mass region from 4 to 4.5 times the proton mass, and decay into "J/psi" or "Psi-prime" particles and pi-mesons. Here J/psi and Psi-prime particles are examples of so-called "charmonium" mesons, bound states of a charm quark and its anti-particle (an anti-charm quark). Since the masses and the decay properties of these new particles do not match theoretical expectations for quark-antiquark combinations, theorists around the world have proposed other potential explanations, which include the possibility that some are made up of four quarks (for example, a combination of a charm quark, an anti-charm quark, an up quark and an anti-up quark). However, since all of these new particles are electrically neutral, it was not experimentally possible to rule out alternative explanations of the new states as excited charmonium mesons.

On the other hand, the newly discovered Z(4430) state has non-zero electric charge, a characteristic that clearly distinguishes this particle from normal quark-antiquark mesons; it, therefore, must have a charm quark, an anti-charm quark and at least two more quarks (for example, an up quark and an anti-down quark). Thus, the Z(4430) does not fit into the framework of known mesons. As a result it has attracted a considerable amount of attention from the world's physics community (Figures 2 and 3).

Single quarks cannot be isolated. Instead, quarks are confined in composite particles such as mesons. This is a characteristic feature of the strong force, described by a mathematical theory called "Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD)". The discoveries of sub-atomic particles at the KEK B-factory provide an experimental foundation for better understanding of the phenomena of quark confinement as well as the formation of matter in QCD.

The discovery of the Z(4430) is described in a paper submitted on October 22 to Physical Review Letters, a leading physics research journal."

Google

Submission + - Google Docs and Spreadsheets Expanding

dhinckley writes: "Google announced today that they will indeed be adding Presentation software to their Docs and Spreadsheets package. With the announcement they revealed that they have purchased Tonic Systems to help them with the new Presentation software and hope to have it ready by sometime this summer. Google's office package is starting to look a bit more comparable to Microsoft Office."

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