Recognize the mother of Wifi
What's your evidence, Richard Easton??!?
What's your evidence, Richard Easton??!?
Give us this day our daily bandwidth,
And forgive us our connectivity issues,
As we forgive those who disrupt our signal.
802.11ac
pfft gtfo 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
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]
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.
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.
Wikipedia link for Easton (and Parkinson) credit for GPS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#:~:text=Bradford%20Parkinson%2C%20professor%20of%20aeronautics,with%20the%20rank%20of%20colonel.
Ee times article referencing FHSS and Nikola Tesla:
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
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.
No one's 'taking' credit, others are ascribing credit. For technological concepts that were foundational, if no longer used. It's like cracking the shits at someone mentioning the hominid that came up with knapping a stone because your dad made scalpels.
Yeah you're correct I misspoke there. I'm not an expert but others are suggesting her invention wasn't used in GPS at all, which the guy's dad is credited with inventing. If that's true that's still a little weird, of course I don't have a problem with her getting credit for anything she invented. I certainly haven't invented anything
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.
I should point out that techniques like FHSS are only a part of what makes up a radio communication method. You can't say it was "the basis of Bluetooth" just because FHSS is one of the many technologies used in Bluetooth. She certainly contributed though.
You got me curious, is that true across all the different options for wifi such as 802.11b and a?
Yes, it's been obsoleted in wifi since 2014. DSSS was always the preferred option and FHSS was never used much in WiFi.
It was hardly ever used in WiFi. Two spread spectrum 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 due to lack of use. It was never "the basis" of WiFi as claimed in the meme - that's simply incorrect.
Don't get me wrong. FHSS is cool and it's a great achievement. It just has little bearing on WiFi and absolutely no relationship to GPS.
Better examples of FHSS would be Bluetooth (which you already mentioned), cordless phones, R/C toys and some military communications.
To be fair, I'd be skeptical if you told me Andy Griffith was the father of 3D printing.
Though I'd google it instead of asking for evidence first.
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
plus he literally tried to snotnose the official twitter of the US Cyber Command posting something that is deeply within their field in their offical capacity for women's history month. It does rather present him as acting in bad faith
It's the 21st Century now. There is no authoritive source of information, they should've added a link to back themselves up. Looking through Wikipedia, calling her the "Mother of WiFi" is a bit rich when there were probably other women more directly involved in WiFi who are more deserving of that title. But she is just the character required to appease the Twitter mob for another day
She invented the foundation of the technology
We call Alan Turing the father of modern computing, because he invented the foundation of the technology
Women more directly involved wouldn't be the "mother" of the technology, they would be the "creator"
It's very loose terminology. We call Oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb when Einstein, etc laid the foundation for the technology. It's a stupid thing to be arguing about
Einstein didn't lay the foundation for the technology, he laid the foundation for the standard model. We call him the father of modern physics. He made the math work, the bomb was already being developed by the Germans. He didn't come up with the idea, he didn't come up with the technology, he just consulted.
Oppenheimer built and led the team that built the bomb. The theories weren't complete, the technology didn't exist, no one had laid out an equation that enabled the technology - they did all that in the Manhattan project.
Every person called the father or mother of <field of science> is a hero, in both the literary and personal sense. They represent looking at something in a new way - their name is an embodiment of a certain way of thinking.
You took a shot at that for no reason
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.
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.
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.
Isn't it still extensively used for RC stuff like drones and model aeroplanes / cars though? Asking as an amateur.
It very much is! It's widely touted as a safety feature, since interference on one frequency means you wont lose control of the flying blender for more than a few milliseconds (well, usually...)
Yes. It works well because this is an application that requires low bandwidth, and interference could cause you to lose control and is even expected with multiple operators in the vicinity. You definitely want to have resilience to other interfering signals.
From a human perspective, yes, that's exactly what it does
If you want to get pedantic about the technical details, it's not time splitting if you're not splitting the time...
Technically speaking, isn’t differentiating between any two things pedantic? For example the moon, and chocolate, both are things. If you don’t want to get pedantic about it.
What I mean is if you don't slice time into slots, you're not using time slicing. It doesn't make sense to talk about time slicing at all anymore
Two devices can transmit at the same time with all sorts of setups, even on the same frequency. And it's not inaccurate to describe time slicing as "a method to allow multiple devices to transmit and receive simultaneously"
The question isn't valid. Being truly pedantic would be pointing out that any number of devices can transmit at the same time, you didn't say the messages would be received
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.
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.
I totally agree with the first part (can't agree with the second because I'm not an honors grad, not in political science, and not from Harvard)
I like both of Brian Mays carreers. The one as the guitarist of Queen, and the one as an astrophycisist
Saw Queen perform with Adam Lambert a few months ago. They played one or two pieces written by Brian May that really tied those two professions of his together. It blows my mind that he’s worked with NASA and the like quite a bit over the years.
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).
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?
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
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.
I'm as much at a loss for what you're saying as the guy above you. No, this is baffling. It's like when non-native English speakers or kids use conjunctions incorrectly and try to connect two entirely unrelated things.
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.
Calling Hedy Lamarr "the Mother of Wifi" because she invented FHSS is like calling E. A. Johnson, who invented the first capacitive touchscreen in 1965, "the Father of the iPhone".
i’m pretty comfortable with calling him that. capacitive touchscreens are a big deal sounds like he deserves the praise.
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.
He did a TED talk in 2010 and there are several articles about him. Not much news in recent years, I guess he wasn't very succesful in turning his motion control concept into a viable product. I interviewed him about eight years 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 and deserve credit for the iPhone way more than he does. 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.
children generally are able to have multiple parents.
if i give credit to Alice for being Bobby’s mother, i’m not minimizing the parenthood of any of Bobby’s other parents. just giving credit where due.
i would not hesitate to give a couple dozen people the title of father/mother/parent of the iPhone. seems quite appropriate and fair.
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!
There is, but most of that technology was in phones and other devices before smartphones came along.
And touch screens were in devices other than smart phones before smart phones came along.
So again, father of the touchscreen, sure. But he did not make smartphones happen. He has nothing to do with 99% of the technology in smartphones.
He invented the capacitive touch screen. The resistive touch screen was in many devices long before smart phones (bank machines being a common example). The resistive touch screen was fine for those applications but it was useless for the smart phone (too slow to respond). The capacitive touch screen’s first killer app was the smartphone, namely the iPhone.
Sure, but the touchscreen is arguably the thing that defines a smartphone. It is the part you interact with and the only part the user really sees.
We had phones before capable of surfing the web and taking and editing pictures. Like Blackberry. But those aren't really seen as smartphones, more like slightly smarter dumbphones.
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.
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...
I guess my point is that it isn't a particularly important part of the design of Wi-Fi - they included it in the very first iteration in 1997 and realised by 1999 they didn't need it. Therefore Wi-Fi would likely have been born regardless of the invention; Bluetooth would not.
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.
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.
There are plenty of women in STEM who deserve more recognition. Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission. Gladys West, came up with the theory that laid the groundwork for GPS. Grace Hopper, inventor of the program linker, without which modern software development would be impossible. Ada Lovelace, arguably the first programmer ever. But calling a woman whose name is one of two on a patent that furthered the development of a radio communication technique originally devised 40 years earlier by Nikola Tesla which Wi-Fi no longer uses "the mother of Wi-Fi" and putting her on a pedestal just because she's a woman, parading her (and only her) around every Women's History Month, and calling anyone who claims she didn't actually invent Wi-Fi (because she died around the time of its creation) a "troglodyte" is not a good look.
Seems to be more than that to his question though
https://lemmy.world/comment/9701067
Plus the child comment seems relevant
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2292387A/en
For anyone else curious about this patent.
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.
edit: However, since this post showed me that a person like Hedy Lamarr has existed in the first place (yeah, I’m not well-versed in mid-20 century American culture, sorry), and interested me (and likely a bunch of others) enough to Google her biography, I’d say it’s a net positive regardless.
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
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." https://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.
I also work with Wi-Fi and am a CWNE, this post is spot on, thank you for writing this with such accuracy and clarity.
I've been thinking of going for my cwna/cwne. I just haven't taken the time to figure out how to go about it.
Any pointers? Obviously I have a pretty solid foundation of knowledge, it's just the whole getting it written thing that I'm most unsure of.
Though, having a good resource for studying just to review, would be nice as well.
For CWNA, the study guide and practice tests are all that I would recommend to pass the exam. The guides contain really good information although I'm sure you'll know a lot of it already. For the CWNP, CWSP and CWAP, I'd recommend the study guide and practice tests again, but with some online research for any topics you're struggling with. The CWAP exam is quite tough so you'll need to get hands on with packet captures. But in general I found most exams to be fair and related to the real world, no vendor specific nonsense or horrible trick questions.
Once those are done the CWNE requires three short essays (less than 1000 words). And some other form of input, such as a white paper or blog, the CWNP website has this detailed but don't worry too much about that now.
For the CWNA, I'd start with the study guide and see how you take to it. I found it really useful throughout my career. Feel free to reach out in the future if you have any questions.
Maybe an ancestor of wifi, but CSIRO invented wifi. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/wireless-lan
Shame how NeoLibs are destroying our greatest national asset by having it focus on profit generation and being independent of government funding.
The CSIRO are absolute guns, the libs can go fuck themselves. They literally started trying to fuck them for climate change modelling.
Seems like plenty of context to me. The CSIRO invented something that changed the world, back before neoliberals cut their funding.
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.
Seems there's more than one. Take your pick
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hedy+lamar+patent+documentary
