Enrico Zini told me about the use of Micro FM transmitters for translation at events including the World Social Forum and gave me links to Open-Source Streaming Translations in Porto Alegre [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends], Nomad [eurotopia], November meetings in Porto Alegre [Babels] and Speechless in Europe [Blogos]
"It's inverse-square. The way to remember the inverse square law is to think of the outgoing signal expanding like a balloon. The surface area of the balloon, if it's a sphere, is 4*pi*r^2, so the amount of power per unit area is the reciprocal of that, proportional to 1/r^2."Michael Maclean commented:
"A potential fun use - I once used one of those gadgets to replicate the "sorting hat" thing from the first Harry Potter film for a Brownie camp my girlfriend was helping out at. There was a radio hidden in the hat and a transmitter attached to an MP3 player for the samples. Basic, but apparently it worked out quite well."
"Bob Sutor, IBM's Vice President of Standards and Open Source has written a good analysis why the specification is more akin to a denial of service attack than an Open Standard."There's more discussion in Georg Greve's wrap-up. See the top of this article on my site for boycott Novell links and so on.
"Minor correction - those "micro FM" transmitters seem to be only 50 nW (nanowatts), not 50mW (milliwatts). At least according to http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/exemption/exemption.pdf I couldn't find the final document from Ofcom's web, but that draft's 50nW is in sync with Finland's similar regulation from August."Good catch! It's IR 2030 from this list and I used a graphical viewer to see the tables. In sans-serif fonts like that, m and n look very similar to my poor eyes. Good old
ps2ascii indeed
confirms
v 87.5 - 108 MHz 50 nW e.r.p.Can you do anything with 50nW? Does the transmitter have to sit on top of the receiver? See the statement from government agency Ofcom for more information. Anyone heard any fun uses of these yet? Tobias commented:
"These transmitters were legalised some month ago in Germany, too. eBay is still overflowing with illegal HK-imports... I made a small list of device which are allowed in Germany on my homepage (see link, currently only in German, since this is now interesting for people from the UK, I will translate it this week...) - See the list at the bottom of the German page for the currently allowed devices..."Rob Hart commented:
"If you assume power from a distant transmitter is inverse-cube law, then 50nw at 80cm, is equivalent to 100w at 1km."Andy Parkins commented:
"The joys of the inverse square law make this not so crazy. Take the 100W transmitter on a hill. Let's say you were 20km away from it. The energy density would be 100/(pi*20000^2) = 79nW per sq metre. It's fairly clear then that as long as you're close to a 50nW transmitter, you will see a signal strength not dissimilar to the signal strength you're getting from the big transmitter. (Incidentally, this is the same reason why mobile phone masts are definitely not dangerous, but mobile phone handsets could potentially be (although unlikely))."The 100W transmitter is 1km away, so 100/(pi*1000^2) = 31830 nW/m^2, compared to my 50nW? And inverse-square or inverse-cube? (Did I mention I hate physics?) Simon Farnsworth commented:
"50nW should be enough power to just about get from a transmitter in a car to a receiver in the same car, provided you've chosen a frequency that's only used by other 50nW devices. Don't forget when trying to work this all out that the inverse square law applies; my maths suggests that if you can receive a 100W transmission from 45km away, you'll be able to receive a 50nW transmission from 1m with the same field strength. Given the sensitivities of a car radio (in my case, I can pick up 2-Ten FM on 102.9 from high terrain in Oxford, some 50 km away from the transmitter), 50nW should be enough for a car radio to pick up a transmitter in the car (1m from the receiver). It's clearly intended to let you use a microtransmitter with your Ogg player in your car, while not letting you use enough power to interfere with the radio in the lorry you're overtaking (whether the driver's listening to their Ogg player through a similar microtransmitter, or to commercial radio)."Damnit, I wondered about broadcasting to the estate around and beneath me.
"Nothing against ippimail, I do like the fact that it uses ad revenue to fund charities, even of my choosing, however, the difference between ippimail and googlemail IS the interface. No offense to the developers, but squirrelmail/horde really needs to be updated. There are many issues with it, which is why any time I use a webmail service that has squirrelmail/horde installed, I immediately look for a way to download the mail and read it in a mailclient of my choice, the thing is - that is going against the whole point of webmail. I haven't researched a lot of your arguments against Google, and I plan to, but just wanted you to know that even though I like what ippimail is doing, I simply cannot stand the interface."I can't comment much on that: I've used squirrelmail without problem in the past. I tried to look at googlemail soon after its launch and was defeated by its totally-WCAG-busting interface. Simon Martin responded with a comment:
"Steev, The interface to Squirrelmail is being updated slowly. To speed the process, help spread the word about ippimail so we can afford to spend more time/money on it." "Hula also seems to be gathering momentum since the community got their hands on it properly..."
FREE RIDE: A bill is being pushed in Congress forbidding all government agencies and state-controlled firms from buying and using any of the computer software sold in the market!Alas, when I first heard of the FOSS bill sometime before September, I also had a bad impression of it. Perhaps I was just too politically allergic at that time (yeah right,) but I tried to adopt a wait-and-see’ approach first and let the dice roll. Perhaps because this bill was to be introduced by a very visible congressman with alleged leftist ties made me feel uncomfortable, but then, so was (and still is) with the current administration. Or perhaps I just felt it wasn’t damn right to legislate FOSS as an end-all solution, preferring instead of presenting is as a process for reforming the local software industry. Looks like first impressions definitely make a difference.
The proposed law to be called “Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006″ commands government offices to use only information and communications software that are given away for free and have no restrictions as to their use. The objectives appear to be to save money for the government and to encourage the making of free (non-commercial) software.So? What’s wrong with these objectives? FWIW, the early FOSS bill draft did seem to have such a Draconian section as forcing the government and allied offices to use, and use only, FOSS. IMHO that by itself ran against the very fundamental ideal of FOSS: the freedom of choice. Not Hobson’s choice, but real choice. The current bill IIRC now allows this true choice; unless there is an extreme case where FOSS cannot be applied without becoming non-self-sustaining (not to mention self-liquidating,) agencies may implement their infrastructure using FOSS as their primary instrument, with the application of open standards (that is, open document formats, open communications protocols, etc) unifying the disparate components. Perhaps right now, this situation may seem kind of far-fetched, but its not really that far-off, considering what other nations and cities have done (or not done) with FOSS. Munich, Extremadura, Beijing… the list is not yet that long, but its bound to go a long way
Now, while the government may now adopt open standards and open-everything, does not mean that the openness’ forgoes security, either; the government may opt to use well-known encryption protocols and even base their own security infrastructure on them. In fact, they are free to even look inside the source of these well-known standards, to study them, and to branch off new implementation that may even change the way these standards work.
In fact, even without this bill in place, the government can participate in the production and development of FOSS!!!
Wait a minute, wasn’t I supposed to defend this bill?
Eh, well. I suppose this bill is good and all, but like I said earlier, there are those first impressions made by the parties involved in the making of this bill which unsettles me. IMHO I would rather see applications of this first in key cities (the happy works in Munich and in Extremadura are no accident, believe me) which in turn, would allow both local the national government to see just exactly how this FOSS magic works. Then, when the observations have been made, the papers are in, and the workers get hired, then, maybe, we’ll have a nation where FOSS can be mandated as a very strong preference, but never a forced one.
Its all about growing up, really. I’m being reminded of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, where a newly-retrenched guy from a telco literally lands into the fantastic job of his life, managing an entire nation of software engineers and architects to develop several killer apps within a year (or so; raid you nearest Book Sale and be lucky Its a great experiment: when it succeeds, you’ll be the first to be present, but when it fails, you’ll be the first to be nowhere.
But I can also hear in the background a call to an unholy war against multinationals whose popular software run virtually all maybe 95 percent? of the computers of the world.Now this is a low blow. Maybe partly because of the prevailing images of the advocates–geeks and leftists, my, what a c-c-c-combo!–is what drives Mr. Pascual to make this point. But really, multinationals are not the main concern. FWIW, FOSS is multinational in nature: it is even multi-denominational and multidisciplinary. FOSS is one of the things that make anonymous people like you and me Internet superheroes. FOSS connects the Internet’s tubes and keeps away the trucks. FOSS makes the Internet serious business, yet also drives them crazy. The Linux distros that I have worked, am working, and continue to work on, are all multinational: Debian and Ubuntu. People from all over the world, from all 7 continents, participate and work on what would arguably be the biggest software distribution the human world may ever produce, freely, regardless of motivation or goal. I suppose all the folks involved have only one common goal, and that is to see a work created for the benefit of the community by the community. I suppose the background howl comes from somewhere altogether, but its hardly just from FOSS. FOSS is the epitome of what is truly multinational, and one thing that is not truly controlled by any one single person, corporation or not.
"Yet another FSF forking project, quite an innovation. Let's take an existing project that works fine and make less compatible, in the name of "freedom," and plop a bunch of Gnu/ GNU/labels/."Ubuntu seems to be getting criticised a lot this week and there's enough people who don't think it "works fine" to start a distribution. JOOI, what else were FSF forking projects? I can think of several reimplementations, but not that many forks. thebluesgnr commented:
"An Ubuntu guy complaining about forking... unbelievable."
"Since all CC licences allow NC copying and distribution, any DRM that limits copying in any way is a breach. Or any DRM as it is also known. And since the CC licenses all support fair use and DreAm (an oxymoronic idea that I thought had died of lack of interest) restricts it, that's another problem. Not to mention how harmful electronic enforcement of CC licenses would be."That's an argument I've heard from several CC supporters, but I don't accept it: fair use is inconsistent globally. What is fair use in the USA might not be fair dealing in England, or the other way around. As to whether any DRM is possible under CC licences, there's the small matter of Lessig's "praise for better DRM" which seems to acknowledge the existance of TPMs that restrict in a CC-OK way. Rob continues:
"Mako's arguments are a rehash of ones that were considered in depth when the debate was happening. Terry covered most of them [in an article on a magazine web site]"Maybe the points Mako presents were considered, maybe they weren't, but it's very hard to tell from the limited transparency of CC. I think the points are clear, direct and difficult to argue against - that may be why it's so hard to get a good debate with CC about this. What's more, Terry Hancock's article is a rehash of his old list posts. I think Terry's points were all covered in mailing list discussions and they don't even try to make a case for the TPM-ban in CC-BY. I like recycling, but it's disappointing to see people use the press to recycle old threads. Also, I don't find it particularly surprising if someone writing for a magazine web site isn't entirely comfortable with some forms of redistribution. Rob finishes with:
"And I would add that, as someone who has installed GNU/Linux on my iPod, who has recently read the Yellow Dog Linux announcement for the PS3, who uses their PS2 as a CD and DVD player, and whose son seems to get MP3s, images and movies onto his PSP OK, I do not understand the argument that the best way of "helping" users is to help third parties trap them under DRM regimes rather than assisting users in installing and using free software."Maybe that's not understandable because it's not an argument that's used, except as a straw man by pro-format-discriminators? Personally, I think it's a pretty poor show that you have an iPod, PSP and so on - weren't Apple's and Sony's DRM-mania well-known when they were bought? Which brings me on to why I feel locked-media distribution is worthwhile: educating people to make better device choices next time. I bought an Ogg player this time - hearing Cory Doctorow's talks as MP3 was partly why. If CC 2.0 had had an aggressive-patent ban similar to CC 3.0's TPM ban, maybe that wouldn't have happened.
Next.