Author: Tommy

I found this link from Slashdot, it's an article on how the electromagnetic spectrum is sliced and divided up among controlling parties. It mentions the FCC's latest partitioning of certain frequencies to Nextel. Also mentioned is the 802.11 "open frequencies", and others.
The article gives a bit of insight as to how the current frequency partitioning mindset came to be, and offers alternatives.

A good read for the curious.

...and another take on Spectrum rights and permissions.

After playing much Battlefield 1942, Havoc informed me of a mod that Dice is putting together for Battlefield Vietnam.
The mod is a World War II mod which reworks many of the BF1942 maps, but with the new BF:Vietnam engine. In the screenshots provided, the foliage has been vastly increased to allow players more cover in gunfights. Also nice to know, the addition of a flame thrower for WWII mod players.
update: Dice has released the v.1.1 patch for BF:Vietnam. This patch does not include the WWII mod.

Also of note, DirectX 9.0c is now available.

AnandTech has posted one of their newest reviews of the 64-bit arena. In this review, they take an Athlon64 3500+ (2.2GHz), 1Gb of PC3500, snap in a GeForceFX video card on the newest nForce3 motherboard and give SuSE, RedHat and WindowsXP-64 a whirl.
Surprise, surprise, Linux comes out on top. However, you should check out the individual results of each test to see the quirks and see which of the 2 linux distos comes out on top. Also interesting to note is the hardware intricacies involved in the setup.

append: and if that's not geek enuf for ya, how about a history lesson? ArsTechnica has a nice write-up on the history of the intel Pentium series, and the short-comings and hurdles along the way for the x86-Pentium processor. Good read, you'll learn a little too.

Ok, by now, most of you have heard in the news about the security problems with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The latest exploits allow "hackers" to install keyloggers to steal passwords, etc. (nevermind the odds of them actually getting your information)
So, after hearing the praises of Mozilla from friends and news stories. And with CERT recommending the switch from IE to Mozilla, I decided it was time for me to give it a shot.

This afternoon I did it. I ditched IE and Outlook Express altogether. I'm now using Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird to replace each program. Thunderbird offers Outlook Express conversion tools to copy over your Address Book and current emails. The Extensions for Firefox are the crown jewels of Mozilla. The Firefox browser is highly customizable and very, very highly recommended. It is a change from the IE you might be used to, but very worth the switch. The Thunderbird mail client is also worth a look if you're sick of all the incoming spam in Outlook and the possible email virus infections so common with Outlook Express.

Today is the first ARRL Field Day exercise that I get to will participate in. Slashdot has a post about this too.
Field Day is a chance for ham radio operators to check their ability to contact other stations without making use of commercial power (power company's power). Instead, ham groups band together, use generators and power their radios that way.
Also included in Field Day is a competition between all ham groups. Each group tries to contact as many other ham radio operators as possible, gaining points for the distance, frequency and power level used. Each group logs their contacts and, in the end, sends their log to the ARRL for ranking.

I volunteered to supply the Nacogdoches Amateur Radio Club with 4 laptops from my office at SFA to use as "logging stations" with some software the group purchased for this purpose.

"Field Day" continues all day Saturday until Sunday evening, depending on when each group begins making contacts. Check with your local group to find their location and check out their stuff. 73!

update: Field Day was awesome. Got to operate on almost all the General-class HF bands. I reached stations all over the US. (I even made contacts as far away as Hawaii and the US Virgin Islands, in the middle of the day!)
The laptop setup was cool, had some problems, but it worked well overall. 3 logging stations with a 4th setup to monitor a map of the US which shows each region where a contact was made. We ran that to a TV so we had a quick, at-a-glance look at where we were making our contacts. The antenna array setup was also cool. Anytime you need a potato gun to hoist an antenna into a tree, is a good day.