Recognize the mother of Wifi

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Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨perishthethought@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩

https://i.imgflip.com/8o8nwd.jpg

What’s your evidence, Richard Easton??!?

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vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Our mother who art in WiFi Thy beacon come Thou handshake be done In ac as in 802.11

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- sukhmel@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  ACK
  
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  - abbadon420@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    SYN
    
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  - Syn_Attck@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    RST
    
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- quaddo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Give us this day our daily bandwidth,
  And forgive us our connectivity issues,
  As we forgive those who disrupt our signal.
  
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- Syn_Attck@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  802.11ac
  
  pfft gtfo out of here we’re gearing up for a war.
  
  LAN SENSING WALL PENETRATING XRAYS BABY! GOOOO 802.11bf
  
  coming soon to an ISP near you
  
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VubDapple@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
From the wiki page

During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband arms dealer Fritz Mandl, “possibly to improve his chances of making a sale”.[41] From the meetings, she learned that navies needed “a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water.” Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo’s guidance system and set it off course.[42] When later discussing this with a new friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, her idea to prevent jamming by frequency hopping met Antheil’s previous work in music. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronizing note-hopping in the avant-garde piece written as a score for the film Ballet Mechanique that involved multiple synchronized player pianos. Antheil’s idea in the piece was to synchronize the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realized that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturized.[4][41]

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- ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Gotcha, WiFi is a bunch of tiny pianists in a box
  
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  - idiomaddict@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s why memes are hard to understand- I’m tone deaf.
    
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  - SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Life is like a box of pianists.
    
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- balp@feddit.nu ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And then we should remember that the patent is on the way of getting the synchronisation, not frequency hoping as such an already know technology. And the connection to Bluetooth and Wifi get down to almost 0.
  
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Icaria@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This post is inaccurate. Neither WiFi nor GPS use FHSS, nor is Lamarr anything close to singularly credited with FHSS’ invention (the earliest patent is credited to Nikola Tesla). This also implies that the Allies used her parent - they did not.

Also Richard Easton is the son of the man who invented GPS and had every right to be skeptical of this claim, and it looks like Internet dipsh*ts have bullied him into deleting his twitter account over this.

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- AliasAKA@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wikipedia link for Easton (and Parkinson) credit for GPS: en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Global_Positioning_System#:~….
  
  Ee times article referencing FHSS and Nikola Tesla:
  
  eetimes.com/a-short-history-of-spread-spectrum/
  
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- Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Eh, i saw easton’s twitter before deletion, he was rather full of himself and prone to being pompously challenging without cause.
  
  Also his father doesn’t mean shit, i’m the kid of a master printer, buggered if i know anything about ink
  
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  - _tezz@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think it’s pretty reasonable to be proud of your family for their accomplishments. And annoyed that someone else would take credit for them.
    
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- riodoro1@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The internet truly is a wonderful place, is it not?
  
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zik@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is mostly wrong: while she did invent what would later be called Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), it isn’t used in modern WiFi or in GPS. It is used in Bluetooth though. (It was an option in older WiFi for a while)

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- Toes@ani.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You got me curious, is that true across all the different options for wifi such as 802.11b and a?
  
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  - zik@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, it’s been obsoleted in wifi since 2014
    
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- bitchkat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So she’s the reason Apple removed the headphone jack?
  
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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - zik@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It was hardly ever used in WiFi. Two modulation schemes were available in the original WiFi spec, FHSS and DSSS. DSSS was always preferred over FHSS and in practice FHSS was hardly used and eventually obsoleted a decade ago. It was never “the basis” of WiFi as claimed in the meme - that’s simply incorrect.
    
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  - NightAuthor@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As written it’s an amazingly impressive claim, but it’s absolutely wrong as I understood it.
    
    It sounds like it’d be much more accurate to say she invented FHSS a foundational technology used in x,y,z
    
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Sotuanduso@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
To be fair, I’d be skeptical if you told me Andy Griffith was the father of 3D printing.

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Sunforged@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Image

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- VerbFlow@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t know who this guy is. Did he do something to Lamarr?
  
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  - unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    He’s the guy in the comment asking for evidence. Which I don’t think is wrong, but it seems like he could’ve done some research and they could’ve posted a link for anyone who wanted to know more
    
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AVincentInSpace@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Calling her “the Mother of Wifi” because she invented FHSS is like crediting Thomas Edison with the invention of everything that used incandescent indicator lights because he invented the lightbulb.

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- spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i’m pretty comfortable with calling him that. capacitive touchscreens are a big deal sounds like he deserves the praise.
  
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  - ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You could always call him “the father of the capacitive touchscreen”.
    
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  - CitizenKong@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Shout out also to John Underkoffler who was the technical advisor on Minority Report (and later Iron Man). The gesture controls in that movie heavily inspired the first smartphones.
    
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  - AVincentInSpace@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Capacitive touchscreens are a big deal but it kind of minimizes the work of the other technology that goes into a smartphone, like wireless internet, low power mobile CPUs capable of 3D graphics, lithium-ion battery packs, etc., to say nothing of the design engineers that worked on the exterior, the hardware, and the operating system. Crediting the holder of a patent from over 40 years before the iPhone hit the market with the creation of the iPhone is stretching the truth at best.
    
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- chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Capacitive touchscreens are the essential technology not just in the iPhone but in all smartphones. Without them we’d still be using flip phones and BlackBerry chiclet keyboards. I think it’s fair to call Johnson the father of the smartphone!
  
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  - Marcbmann@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    How about father of the touch screen? There’s a fuck ton of technology in smartphones.
    
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- praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - someguy7734206@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Father/mother of computers, the person who first controlled fire.
    
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caboose2006@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Woman make thing!? Me no likely! Woke lie!

Fucking troglodytes.

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- AVincentInSpace@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are plenty of women in STEM who deserve more recognition. Grace Hopper, inventor of the software compiler. Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission. Ada Lovelace, arguably the first programmer ever. But let’s not go around calling a woman whose name is one of two on a patent that furthered the development of a radio communication technique originally devised by Nikola Tesla which Wi-Fi no longer uses “the mother of Wi-Fi” and putting her on a pedestal as the only woman in STEM.
  
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  - Aux@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Whoa, mate! That’s too many facts! We don’t like facts here!
    
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- Droechai@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Seems to be more than that to his question though
  
  lemmy.world/comment/9701067
  
  Plus the child comment seems relevant
  
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MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It goes to show that being a good actress doesn’t mean that you can’t also be good at tech, even if you don’t like to to brag about it.

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- PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Reminds me of that time someone got into a Twitter beef with Rage Against The Machine. They dropped the “it’s not like you have a degree in political science or anything” line. The lead guitarist went to Harvard for social sciences.
  
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  - ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Here you go :)
    
    Image
    
    And the links:
    
    OG Twitter(x)
    
    Insta with pic
    
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  - FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I like both of Brian Mays carreers. The one as the guitarist of Queen, and the one as an astrophycisist
    
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- Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m from a Tech and Science background (unfinished Physics degree, most-definitelly-finished EE degree and then about 2 decades at the bleeding edge of Informatics) and some years ago came in contact with the Theatre Acting world for a couple of years whilst living in London (UK), doing various short courses, seeing fringe Theatre and getting acquainted with various (not famous) actors and directors.
  
  Most were surprisingly (for me, at the time, with my pre-made ideas from my Science background and 2 decades in Tech) intelligent people.
  
  Good acting using modern acting techniques and good directing do require quite a lot of brains to pull do well, IMHO, since in things like method acting well before there’s any acting of what’s on a script, there’s a whole process of analysing them and various techniques for discovering the emotions of the character (best I can describe in a short space), at least for stage acting.
  
  The only main difference in capabilities, I would say, is that at least in Acting there is a much higher proportion of Extroverts than Introverts, the very opposite of the proportion in Science and Tech, and Introverts are the ones with the personality type that’s detailed oriented and hence more likely to come up with things like new or changed processes for doing things (IMHO).
  
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- Icaria@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever read, even with context. In the history of the human race, has anyone specifically accused good actresses of not being good with tech?
  
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  - Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If I remember correctly at the time powers that be kept standing in the way of her presenting this tech to the military purely based on her gender
    
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  - Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A lot of classic hollywood actresses still have the dumb bombshell idea attached. Didn’t help that the studios actively created the marketing as such.
    
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  - spujb@lemmy.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    not every argument needs to be borne out of a counterargument. this is a mean comment in response to a genuine and meaningful analysis of human potential.
    
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henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Note that this frequency hopping is no longer used in most WiFi networks today. It is, however, critical to classic Bluetooth, and BLE still somewhat uses it. I have no idea how it’s related to GPS.

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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Frequency hopping in wifi was never well supported. 802.11a was primarily DSSS and afaik, very few, if any consumer devices supported the FHSS mode.
  
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  - henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Indeed. Just speaking from a signals point of view, frequency hopping is not competitive for high bandwidth applications. It is however surprisingly durable in the presence of interference despite its simplicity. We’re seeing this play out in newer Bluetooth standards.
    
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- theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Time splitting is just lazy frequency hopping, change my mind
  
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  - henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Can two devices transmit at exactly the same time with time splitting?
    
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FBJimmy@lemmus.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Great to recognise this invention.

I was surprised by the choice of ‘Mother of Wi-Fi’ though - Wi-Fi hasn’t used ‘frequency hopping’ as such since 802.11b was released back in 1999 - so very few people will have ever used frequency-hopping Wi-Fi.

GPS only uses it in some extreme cases I think, but I’m not an expert.

However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so ‘Mother of Bluetooth’ might have been more appropriate.

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- sik0fewl@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So her invention isn’t used for Wifi now, but was used in the initial design of it? You might even say she helped give birth to it…
  
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  - FBJimmy@lemmus.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I guess my point is that it isn’t a particularly important part of the design of Wi-Fi - it would likely have been born regardless of the invention; Bluetooth would not.
    
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  - VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah but her work built on someone else’s so we’re taking it all away from her and calling them parents of her work so she gets nothing…
    
    Doesn’t feel as fun anymore, does it?
    
    Let the guys dad have some credit for his work, give her credit for her work - I don’t get what’s so controversial.
    
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- grue@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so ‘Mother of Bluetooth’ might have been more appropriate.
  
  Considering the namesake of Bluetooth, the “Mother of Bluetooth” sounds like the kind of person who would have a tea party with “Grendel’s Mother” from Beowulf.
  
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- MycelialMass@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Before 802.11b though?
  
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  - bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Uh I don’t think there was Wifi before that
    
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HipsterTenZero@dormi.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The headcrab Kleiner keeps as a pet in HL2 was named after her!

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- perishthethought@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Whoa, cool! (Huge fan of the games here and didn’t know that)
  
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  - RubberElectrons@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A bit dark humor-wise lol… Heady, the defanged headcrab 😬
    
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Frogodendron@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s a brief five-minute Google search for me, but it seems that everyone has problems with both reading comprehension and/or causality evaluation.

I think it’s great that such a patent exists and that the technology was invented by her. Yet, even checking the frequency-hopping spread spectrum page on Wikipedia shows that it was only one invention in the long series of discoveries and technologies, which was neither the first, nor the most crucial of them, and this particular option seems to be one of the sources of inspiration for later technologies (along with a bunch of predecessors).

The rest of the criticisms regarding the choice of Wi-Fi over Bluetooth is already mentioned in the comments of others.

I really don’t want to minimise the contribution of an individual towards the development of sophisticated technologies, and I have zero qualms about this individual being a woman, I just think that the presentation oversells the achievement which might cause additional mockery from those who do think that women (and actresses at that!) have no business in anything serious.

What I actually find impressive, however, is that a woman, at the time where women’s rights were far from what they are today (just read about her first marriage, that must have been hard), could be both an actress, an inventor, a producer, all while leading quite a bitter life it seems. Not many can boast that.

I guess where I’m going with that is that she, as many others, may be best praised as an example of a complex person that had many achievements as well as many hardships. Using her as a basis of “Didn’t think an actress could do something worthwhile? Gotcha!” statement seems a bit shallow.

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- Traegert@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Don’t try and oversell “famous woman does tech thing”. Try and and make people aware of the women who actually did really cool tech things. Marie Curie was a bad ass
  
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  - cows_are_underrated@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I can 100% agree with that. Sadly She often gets forgotten.
    
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perishthethought@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
patents.google.com/patent/US2292387A/en

For anyone else curious about this patent.

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AtariDump@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Image

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- MycelialMass@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  First thing i thought of too lol
  
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- boredtortoise@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Too bad she didn’t get the joke
  
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  - Scrawny@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is 1874. You’ll be able to sue her!
    
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Cornpop@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
From my research it is not the basis of WiFi though, it was specifically for encrypting communications to torpedos.

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- Edge004@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It was designed for encrypting communications to torpedos, but it laid the groundwork for wifi, bluetooth, and gps to be made.
  
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DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Maybe an ancestor of wifi, but CSIRO invented wifi. www.csiro.au/en/research/…/wireless-lan

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- Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Shame how NeoLibs are destroying our greatest national asset by having it focus on profit generation and being independent of government funding.
  
  smh.com.au/…/csiro-neoliberal-obsession-with-priv…
  
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  - Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The CSIRO are absolute guns, the libs can go fuck themselves. They’ve literally started trying to fuck them for climate change modelling.
    
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  - Railing5132@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Okay, well, I’m a network professional with a specialty in wireless and a keen interest in historical wireless networking, and “non-standard” stuff is also quite interesting. I’m no Richard Easton.

I want to start with a disclaimer, by no means would I, nor should I be interpreted to be saying or implying that any contribution, regardless of source, isn’t valuable. Whether it comes from a woman, or man, white, black, or any color in-between, non-binary, gay, bi, trans, whatever. The contributor is valuable and their contribution is always valued.

That being said, FHSS, has its uses, and it’s been used in wireless. It’s a valid technology that should be recognised as such. As with many things, it wasn’t a singular effort, and nobody should imply otherwise.

As others have pointed out, the most commonly known technology which employs FHSS is Bluetooth; and trust me, trying to track down issues caused by BT interference is a nightmare because of it. Generally I avoid the problem by not using the 2.4ghz ISM band as much as possible, but I digress.

For those saying it’s not part of 802.11, it actually is. It’s an old part of the protocol which has long since been replaced and it is considered obsolete by the IEEE 802.11 group.

However, in the 802.11 protocol, sometimes called 802.11 prime (Wikipedia calls it “legacy”), it states: “[802.11] specified two raw data rates of 1 and 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s) to be transmitted via infrared (IR) signals or by either frequency hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) in the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11_(legacy_mode)

All I want to really add, is that networking is a team sport. If companies and people didn’t work together to make it function, then it wouldn’t work.

Only by collaborating and working together towards improvement and an increase in the ability of the technology to work across all platforms, vendors, manufacturers, and devices, can we get it to function at all. This fact is as true now as it was when FHSS was invented. Everyone needs to work together in order to make any real progress. Otherwise, all of our wifi stuff would “speak” different languages, and nothing outside of a single companies product line, would work with anything else.

Everyone’s contributions have helped wifi get to it’s current state, and that should never be forgotten.

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h3ndrik@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wifi doesn’t use frequency hopping. That’s bluetooth.

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restingboredface@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There is a great documentary about her on Netflix. It covers her love of science and her attempts to get her design to the military for the war effort.

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BilboBargains@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fire up the ROFL-copter, we got a live one.

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IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“Mother of Wifi” is a stretch. But “mother of Alka-Seltzer”? Definitely. “Midwife of the traffic signal”? Sure.

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ArugulaZ@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That’s “Hedley.”

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Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Least sexist blue check

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Gabu@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That’s an incredibly sensationalistic way to put it. By that logic, the ancient greeks are the forefathers of WiFi, because they figured how to create static electricity using cotton and ambar.

You can (and should) give credit without overstating their achievement.

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captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wait til he finds out that the first computer programs were written by some poet with daddy issues

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Chuymatt@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Blue check…

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niktemadur@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
She took on where Heinrich Hertz left off, and made it to the top of the Tinseltown heap!
C’mon… you know you wanna see a musical on the life of Heinrich Hertz.

Considering the man spent over a year working in a blacked-out room, trying to detect the faint spark of electricity transmitted wirelessly, it’s gonna have a song or three about fumbling or stumbling in the dark.

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Got_Bent@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s 1874! We’ll sue HER!

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