putty_thing - Slashdot User

Comment Re:30$? (Score 3, Informative) 135

by putty_thing on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:21AM (#42140639) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: DIY 4G Antenna Design For the Holidays?

I was joking originally but just Googled it, a lot of the used 4G frequency range is pretty close to the 2.4Ghz that has been used for wifi cantennas, looks like you can build something pretty easily.

Comment Re:30$? (Score 4, Insightful) 135

by putty_thing on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:16AM (#42140609) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: DIY 4G Antenna Design For the Holidays?

Exactly, Pringles cost way less than $30

Pulsar Signals Could Provide Galactic GPS 146

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday May 27, 2009 @11:20AM from the pioneer-10-was-there-first dept.

KentuckyFC writes "We're all familiar with GPS. It consists of a network of satellites that each broadcast a time signal. A receiver on Earth can then work out its position in three-dimensional space by comparing the arrival times of the signals from at least three satellites. That's handy, but it only works on Earth. Now astronomers say that the millisecond signals from a network of pulsars could allow GPS-style navigation on a galactic scale. They propose using four pulsars that form a rough tetrahedron with the Solar System at its center, and a co-ordinate system with its origin at 00:00 on 1 January 2001 at the focal point of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, the radio telescope near Cambridge in the UK that first observed pulsars. The additional complexity of working with signals over these distances is that relativity has to be taken into account (which is why the origin is defined as a point in space-time rather than just space). The pulsar GPS system should allow users to determine their position in space-time anywhere in the galaxy to within a few nanoseconds, which corresponds to an accuracy of about a meter." Pulsars slow down over time, and the arXiv paper doesn't seem to mention this. The paper is mainly about establishing a coordinate system and a reference selection of pulsars. Any proposed Galactic Positioning System would have to take the slowing into account, and since it is poorly understood and not completely predictable, this would limit accuracy.

Morality of Throttling a Local ISP? 640

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 15, 2009 @08:27PM from the what-would-larry-do dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I work for a small (400 customers) local cable ISP. For the company, the ISP is only a small side business, so my whole line of expertise lies in other areas, but since I know the most about Linux and networking I've been stuck into the role of part-time sysadmin. In examining our backbone and customer base I've found out that we are oversubscribed around 70:1 between our customers' bandwidth and our pipe. I've gone to the boss and showed him the bandwidth graphs of us sitting up against the limit for the better part of the day, and instead of purchasing more bandwidth, he has asked me to start implementing traffic shaping and packet inspection against P2P users and other types of large downloaders. Because this is in a certain limited market, the customers really only have the choice between my ISP and dial-up. I'm struggling with the desire to give the customers I'm administering the best experience, and the desire to do what my boss wants. In my situation, what would you do?"

Comment Safest roads (Score 1) 703

by putty_thing on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:15PM (#14039287) Attached to: UK To Passively Monitor Every Vehicle

Putting aside the massive privacy issues, and assuming it is used to monitor speeding; why put speed cameras on the statistically safest roads in the country? Speed cameras (statistically again) have rarely managed to improve accident rates where deployed, so I'll look foward to seeing how they justify this one (no doubt it will stop terrorists..).

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