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An AV1 encoder is about 130x times more complex to encode than HEVC (H.265) when comparing reference models.

See UNDERSTANDING THE VIDEO CODEC JUNGLE: A COMPARISON OF TCO AND COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY.

No wonder the public cloud people like it, you'll pay them a ton of money encoding files!

Live is going to be a real hassle, almost impossible. It is all we can do to get a good 4K live encode with HEVC at reasonable bit rates.

What is really exciting is the next MPEG JVET codec, VVC (likely H.266). Even better performance than AV1 or HEVC, but with a minor increase in complexity.

Probably not

Link to a page with the report. Direct link to the PDF.

A couple of tidbits that I, personally, found interesting:

- The definition of E-waste: "all items of electrical and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by its owner as waste without the intent of re-use". This includes everything from appliances to solar cells to smartphones.

- On a per-person basis, E-waste is highest in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. However, Europe had the highest recycling rate (35%).

- Unstated, but North America is likely the biggest generator, because the figures given are for "the Americas", which includes North, Central and South in one big lump. That's a really odd decision, for a way to group countries.

- The report claims that only 20% of E-waste is recycled through "appropriate" channels, but they do not define what an "appropriate channel" is.

Living in Europe, I do not believe the recycling figures. In many European countries - and certainly where I live - it would be very difficult *not* to recycle an appliance. Sure, a small charger may land in a wastebasket, but a washing machine? A refrigerator? We don't have public dumps, and these don't fit in a municipal garbage bag. - the recycling center is the only possible place to dispose of these. More: recycling is free (actually: pre-paid with the original purchase price). The last figures I saw nationally were well over 70%, and I suspect the rates are a lot higher by now.

Now, how the recycling companies work is a different matter. Some of them ship the devices to unlicensed or fraudulent companies in Africa or Asia for disassembly, which is often...um...suboptimal. But that is an entirely different problem, actually an enforcement problem since this behavior is (afaik) illegal.

The US has a much bigger problem - not only with E-waste, but with garbage in general. Hauling your garbage off to dumps and burying it, having zero control over what lands in those dumps, geez. Separate the bulk recyclables, incinerate the trash (free electricity + heat), run the ash through separators to recover more metals and minerals. But no, it gets buried, the dumps will eventually leak, and future generations will have to clean it all up.

Link to a page with the report. Direct link to the PDF.

A couple of tidbits that I, personally, found interesting:

- The definition of E-waste: "all items of electrical and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by its owner as waste without the intent of re-use". This includes everything from appliances to solar cells to smartphones.

- On a per-person basis, E-waste is highest in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. However, Europe had the highest recycling rate (35%).

- Unstated, but North America is likely the biggest generator, because the figures given are for "the Americas", which includes North, Central and South in one big lump. That's a really odd decision, for a way to group countries.

- The report claims that only 20% of E-waste is recycled through "appropriate" channels, but they do not define what an "appropriate channel" is.

Living in Europe, I do not believe the recycling figures. In many European countries - and certainly where I live - it would be very difficult *not* to recycle an appliance. Sure, a small charger may land in a wastebasket, but a washing machine? A refrigerator? We don't have public dumps, and these don't fit in a municipal garbage bag. - the recycling center is the only possible place to dispose of these. More: recycling is free (actually: pre-paid with the original purchase price). The last figures I saw nationally were well over 70%, and I suspect the rates are a lot higher by now.

Now, how the recycling companies work is a different matter. Some of them ship the devices to unlicensed or fraudulent companies in Africa or Asia for disassembly, which is often...um...suboptimal. But that is an entirely different problem, actually an enforcement problem since this behavior is (afaik) illegal.

The US has a much bigger problem - not only with E-waste, but with garbage in general. Hauling your garbage off to dumps and burying it, having zero control over what lands in those dumps, geez. Separate the bulk recyclables, incinerate the trash (free electricity + heat), run the ash through separators to recover more metals and minerals. But no, it gets buried, the dumps will eventually leak, and future generations will have to clean it all up.

HDR isn't standardized

Please see ITU-R Rec. BT.2100 "Image parameter values for high dynamic range television for use in production and international programme exchange".

Why does it take years to draft a standard?

Because the ITU made a plan how to get to the new G5 standard:
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/study-groups/rsg5/rwp5d/imt-2020/Pages/default.aspx

Huh?

The Impact of Leap Seconds on Digital Time Services
Judah Levine
Time and Frequency Division
NIST, Boulder, Colorado
paper

The ITU-R first received this issue as Question 236/7 in year 2001. They have spent nearly 15 years coming up with this list of 6 methods for dealing with leap seconds. In that note the most recent "Method D" from a group of countries who prefer no change because they are not satisfied with the documents that have been submitted to the ITU-R during the past decade.

The debate continues because it is not a technical issue. We know how to count SI seconds by physicists watching cesium atoms, and we know how to count calendar days by astronomers watching the earth rotate. The question is about time producers and time consumers -- which of the time producers will have the hegemony, and whether the time consumers have enough agency to choose what time scale to use for their applications. The question is whether the days of the civil calendar will remain related to the rotating earth, or change to be 794 243 384 928 000 hyperfine oscillations of cesium-133.

The ITU-R first received this issue as Question 236/7 in year 2001. They have spent nearly 15 years coming up with this list of 6 methods for dealing with leap seconds. In that note the most recent "Method D" from a group of countries who prefer no change because they are not satisfied with the documents that have been submitted to the ITU-R during the past decade.

The debate continues because it is not a technical issue. We know how to count SI seconds by physicists watching cesium atoms, and we know how to count calendar days by astronomers watching the earth rotate. The question is about time producers and time consumers -- which of the time producers will have the hegemony, and whether the time consumers have enough agency to choose what time scale to use for their applications. The question is whether the days of the civil calendar will remain related to the rotating earth, or change to be 794 243 384 928 000 hyperfine oscillations of cesium-133.

At least globally speaking we're seeing an absolutely massive growth in cell phone use and coverage. According to the last figures from the ITU (pdf) some 95% of the world's population will live in range of a 2G network by the end of this year and 69% in 3G. With the rapid transition towards smartphones in low-cost markets as well even more 3G/4G coverage will be built out and the less room is it for satellite internet to fill in the cracks. I have a friend of mine who used to have it, between the caps and latency he switched the moment he could get something better than dial-up. Even if this is a less crappy alternative, I don't think it'll be competitive when you have other choices.

Unix again does it wrong by keeping system time in UTC rather than TAI.

Actually, that's not what POSIX does, for any definition of "keeping system time in UTC" corresponding to the ITU-R specification, as the POSIX definition of "seconds since the Epoch" and its mapping to a struct tm doesn't allow the seconds value to be 60, which it will be during a positive leap second.

I.e., it's even more wrong - a POSIX-compliant time_t isn't something that corresponds to TAI (as it doesn't tick forward by 1 every second of elapsed time) and you can't generate valid UTC labels (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) from it.

UTC is useful for humans

...but I suspect few clocks used by humans give a local time corresponding to UTC - most of the digital ones won't show "60" in the seconds section one second after June 30, 2015 at 23:59:59 UTC, and I don't know what the right thing to do for the second hand on an analog clock would be (for an analog clock without a second hand, presumably the minute hand should move two seconds after June 30, 2015 23:59:59 UTC).

but difficult for machines, it should be handled by the human interface libraries, just like time zones. Kernel time should be TAI of course.

I.e., "seconds since the Epoch" should actually be a count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch, rather than being, well, what it is.

When leap seconds are inserted, systems must be updated,

...and whatever data structures are used to keep tract of future scheduled events might have to be updated to reflect that, for example, July 1, 2015, 00:00:00 UTC is going to be one more second later than was expected at the time an event was scheduled for that date and time.

However, having system time tick ahead one second every second means that events scheduled to occur N seconds from now, rather than scheduled to occur at YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS UTC, won't have their time messed up by leap seconds; it's not as if the POSIX solution doesn't screw up anything.

but that is not particularly harder than keeping the time zone files up-to-date is already.

Especially given that leap seconds are part of the Olson^WIANA time zone source files.

Umm... The very definition of a minute is that it *IS* always 60 seconds. Why would I be wrong if I wrote software based on that? That's like saying I shouldn't "assume" that a mile is 5280 feet. Its not really an "assumption" if that's its very definition.

Nevertheless, according to the definition of UTC, the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 if there's a positive leap second.

Pulsars are precision references that could easily be used on a spacecraft with a suitable radio:
http://www.itu.int/pub/R-REP-R...

I think the special part is that 2.4 GHz is a convenient frequency where there is a balance between a larger amount of energy being absorbed by water and a smaller amount of energy being absorbed by glass and plastic.

No, 2.4 GHz was just one of seven convenient open frequency bands when, in 1947, the FCC assigned frequencies for the industrial heating, diathermy, and other RF sources that were causing interference on communication systems. These bands were scattered from 25 MHz to 20 GHz. See p. 8 and p. 50-51 of the Thirteenth Annual Report of the FCC, and the 1947 US Frequency Allocation Proposal to the Atlantic City International Radio Conference (see pdf page 464 of this pdf file). They were collectively called the "ISM bands", because the FCC aggregated Industrial heating, Scientific uses, and Medical heating (diathermy) equipment into bands that would minimize interference to communication systems. The microwave oven (called an "electronic cooker" in the FCC report) was so new that it was explicitly mentioned, and lumped in with other "industrial" heating systems.

From the "Measuring the Information Society" report report prepared by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union:

"Between 2010 and 2011, mobile-cellular subscriptions uptake of both fixed (wired)-broadband and mobile-registered continuous double-digit growth in developing-country markets, but an overall slowdown in comparison with previous years. The number of mobile-cellular subscriptions increased by more than 600 million, almost all of them in the developing world, to a total of around 6 billion, or 86 per 100 inhabitants, globally".

The statistic isn't useless, just misstated. The study she's talking about (referred to here) actually found that out of all the STEM jobs shown in movies and TV shows, 16% of them were filled by females and 84% were filled by males. Not the same as saying 16% of female characters and 84% of male characters held STEM jobs. I'm suspicious, though, because the study also found that "No female protagonists or co leads are shown with STEM careers." I'm pretty sure that Emily Deschanel's character on Bones has a STEM job.

From the 16 July ITU press release:

... G.fast is designed to deliver superfast downloads up to a distance of 250 meters, thereby eliminating the expense of installing fibre between the distribution point and people’s homes.

Because that's what this is all about. It's yet another excuse not to make the investment we've all been waiting so long for. And besides, most subscribers will not be within 250 meters of their DSLAM anyway, crosstalk can still lead to a significant reduction in performance and the upload speed will always be just a fraction of 1Gbps.

Will the only way forward be for us to nationalize our telecommunications infrastructure?

During the one second interval when they are applied, what happens to [UTC] timestamps on files that are modified?

Whoosh.

You're not describing a problem, you are the problem. If an event occurs during a leap second, you simply timestamp the time, 23:59:60.x. What you describe simply demonstrates the problem with incorrect assumptions and sloppy coding: that a minute can't have more than 60 seconds. That hasn't been the case for over 40 years.

based on POSIX-compliant UTC

'taint no such thing. There's UTC, and there's POSIX, which is in no way compatible with UTC, which existed long before POSIX. Just another example of brain-dead, incorrect assumptions about timescales.

Since July 2012, IIRC, all corrections are now formally set at six month intervals.

YRI. You should at least try to understand the subject you're discussing.

"A positive or negative leap-second should be the last second of a UTC month, but first preference should be given to the end of December and June, and second preference to the end of March and September.
- ITU-R TF.460-6.

The ITU has also put up an issue of ITU News with in depth articles.

You touch on a lot of good stuff ()... ISPs are () datacenters, datacenters handle bandwidth... on a large enough scale bandwidth = power.

And power = control, therefore bandwidth = control.

Apparently the U.N. (World Summit on the Information Society) and the German courts believe that bandwidth has become fundamental to modern life.

However, the U.S. still believes it has the option of doing pretty much as they please, so don't expect a corporation acting with its blessing to feel beholden to a set of ideals which may conflict with expediency in the exercise of governmental power or worse, revenue. After all, Constitutional War Powers, the Geneva Conventions of War, Habeas Corpus, Federal Information Surveillance Act, the reasonable search requirements of the Fourth Amendment, and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (for persons, not artificial persons) have all been under duress from Congress and the president, for quite some time.

Unequal Protection, for those of you who don't mind the intrigues of history, is a good read on the history of the corporate assault on the individual rights of persons, which the architects of the U.S. government attempted to protect from assault by that very same institution. Not that I mind the notion of self determination and fundamental freedoms or my ability to speak my mind, but the hypocrisies apparent in the distribution of power seem undeniable when the interests of corporations dominate the everyday life of individuals in health care, environmental protection, adjudication of legal priority in the contest between religious freedom and the institution of the Church.

The economy is in chaos because the greedheads don't understand reasonable limits, and the weakness of men has unveiled the institutionalized classicism we inherited from our European predecessors and embedded beneath the facade of equality!

It's feudal!

ISO OSI covers TCP/IP in that it is a logical break down of the various aspects of the stack. The fact that most implementations shortcut aspects of it for performance does not mean it is invald. It is a useful abstraction even if only in theory.

There's the OSI Reference Model, as described by ISO/IEC 7498-1 (available as ITU-T Recommendation X.200), and there's the OSI protocol stack, with protocols such as the Connectionless Network Protocol ISO/IEC 8473-1 (available as X.233), the Connection-Oriented Transfer Protocol ISO/IEC 8073 (available as X.224), and the Connectionless Transport Protocol ISO/IEC 8602 (available as X.234).

The "ISO OSI" that "covers TCP/IP" is the Reference Model. The person to whom you're responding is talking about the OSI protocol stack.

ISO OSI covers TCP/IP in that it is a logical break down of the various aspects of the stack. The fact that most implementations shortcut aspects of it for performance does not mean it is invald. It is a useful abstraction even if only in theory.

There's the OSI Reference Model, as described by ISO/IEC 7498-1 (available as ITU-T Recommendation X.200), and there's the OSI protocol stack, with protocols such as the Connectionless Network Protocol ISO/IEC 8473-1 (available as X.233), the Connection-Oriented Transfer Protocol ISO/IEC 8073 (available as X.224), and the Connectionless Transport Protocol ISO/IEC 8602 (available as X.234).

The "ISO OSI" that "covers TCP/IP" is the Reference Model. The person to whom you're responding is talking about the OSI protocol stack.

ISO OSI covers TCP/IP in that it is a logical break down of the various aspects of the stack. The fact that most implementations shortcut aspects of it for performance does not mean it is invald. It is a useful abstraction even if only in theory.

There's the OSI Reference Model, as described by ISO/IEC 7498-1 (available as ITU-T Recommendation X.200), and there's the OSI protocol stack, with protocols such as the Connectionless Network Protocol ISO/IEC 8473-1 (available as X.233), the Connection-Oriented Transfer Protocol ISO/IEC 8073 (available as X.224), and the Connectionless Transport Protocol ISO/IEC 8602 (available as X.234).

The "ISO OSI" that "covers TCP/IP" is the Reference Model. The person to whom you're responding is talking about the OSI protocol stack.

ISO OSI covers TCP/IP in that it is a logical break down of the various aspects of the stack. The fact that most implementations shortcut aspects of it for performance does not mean it is invald. It is a useful abstraction even if only in theory.

There's the OSI Reference Model, as described by ISO/IEC 7498-1 (available as ITU-T Recommendation X.200), and there's the OSI protocol stack, with protocols such as the Connectionless Network Protocol ISO/IEC 8473-1 (available as X.233), the Connection-Oriented Transfer Protocol ISO/IEC 8073 (available as X.224), and the Connectionless Transport Protocol ISO/IEC 8602 (available as X.234).

The "ISO OSI" that "covers TCP/IP" is the Reference Model. The person to whom you're responding is talking about the OSI protocol stack.

ITU like most standards development organizations has a RAND policy (IP must be declared by participants during the standardization process, and must be made available on a reasonable, non-discriminary basis to those implementing the standards).

The problem is with folks not part of the process who hold IP that may be infringed by people using the standard.

I believe that any important ANSI-approved standard should require a "put up or shut up" period of one year - after public notice, any non-participants must state if they have IP that is essential to the standard within that year period.

You don't have to do this for every standard, but something like H.264 and H.265 is a very widely-used and important standard that you'd prefer not to have submarine IP in.

This is nothing about DNS. The slippery slope argument (for good or ill) the major Internet powers used to justify refusal is that treaty language implies that signatory governments have a mutual international obligation to do content monitoring (e.g., deep packet inspection). These clauses were argued to be non-content-neutral, and (for instance) coud allow Iran to insist that the US prohibit blastphemous content (for Shiite Muslim definitions of "blastphemy").

As per this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology, there's an ITU-T Recommendation "Y.2770: Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks", which is "restricted to TIES users", where "TIES (Telecommunication Information Exchange Service) is a set of networked information resources and services offered by ITU without any charge to ITU Members (Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and Academia) to support their participation in the activities of the Union." Not being a Member State, a Sector Member, an Associate, or a member of Academia, I have no idea what that recommendation says; it might be Very Nice if somebody who did have access to it were to upload it to wcitleaks.org.

This is nothing about DNS. The slippery slope argument (for good or ill) the major Internet powers used to justify refusal is that treaty language implies that signatory governments have a mutual international obligation to do content monitoring (e.g., deep packet inspection). These clauses were argued to be non-content-neutral, and (for instance) coud allow Iran to insist that the US prohibit blastphemous content (for Shiite Muslim definitions of "blastphemy").

As per this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology, there's an ITU-T Recommendation "Y.2770: Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks", which is "restricted to TIES users", where "TIES (Telecommunication Information Exchange Service) is a set of networked information resources and services offered by ITU without any charge to ITU Members (Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and Academia) to support their participation in the activities of the Union." Not being a Member State, a Sector Member, an Associate, or a member of Academia, I have no idea what that recommendation says; it might be Very Nice if somebody who did have access to it were to upload it to wcitleaks.org.

This is nothing about DNS. The slippery slope argument (for good or ill) the major Internet powers used to justify refusal is that treaty language implies that signatory governments have a mutual international obligation to do content monitoring (e.g., deep packet inspection). These clauses were argued to be non-content-neutral, and (for instance) coud allow Iran to insist that the US prohibit blastphemous content (for Shiite Muslim definitions of "blastphemy").

As per this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology, there's an ITU-T Recommendation "Y.2770: Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks", which is "restricted to TIES users", where "TIES (Telecommunication Information Exchange Service) is a set of networked information resources and services offered by ITU without any charge to ITU Members (Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and Academia) to support their participation in the activities of the Union." Not being a Member State, a Sector Member, an Associate, or a member of Academia, I have no idea what that recommendation says; it might be Very Nice if somebody who did have access to it were to upload it to wcitleaks.org.

This is nothing about DNS. The slippery slope argument (for good or ill) the major Internet powers used to justify refusal is that treaty language implies that signatory governments have a mutual international obligation to do content monitoring (e.g., deep packet inspection). These clauses were argued to be non-content-neutral, and (for instance) coud allow Iran to insist that the US prohibit blastphemous content (for Shiite Muslim definitions of "blastphemy").

As per this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology, there's an ITU-T Recommendation "Y.2770: Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks", which is "restricted to TIES users", where "TIES (Telecommunication Information Exchange Service) is a set of networked information resources and services offered by ITU without any charge to ITU Members (Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and Academia) to support their participation in the activities of the Union." Not being a Member State, a Sector Member, an Associate, or a member of Academia, I have no idea what that recommendation says; it might be Very Nice if somebody who did have access to it were to upload it to wcitleaks.org.

This is nothing about DNS. The slippery slope argument (for good or ill) the major Internet powers used to justify refusal is that treaty language implies that signatory governments have a mutual international obligation to do content monitoring (e.g., deep packet inspection). These clauses were argued to be non-content-neutral, and (for instance) coud allow Iran to insist that the US prohibit blastphemous content (for Shiite Muslim definitions of "blastphemy").

As per this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology, there's an ITU-T Recommendation "Y.2770: Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks", which is "restricted to TIES users", where "TIES (Telecommunication Information Exchange Service) is a set of networked information resources and services offered by ITU without any charge to ITU Members (Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and Academia) to support their participation in the activities of the Union." Not being a Member State, a Sector Member, an Associate, or a member of Academia, I have no idea what that recommendation says; it might be Very Nice if somebody who did have access to it were to upload it to wcitleaks.org.

This is nothing about DNS. The slippery slope argument (for good or ill) the major Internet powers used to justify refusal is that treaty language implies that signatory governments have a mutual international obligation to do content monitoring (e.g., deep packet inspection). These clauses were argued to be non-content-neutral, and (for instance) coud allow Iran to insist that the US prohibit blastphemous content (for Shiite Muslim definitions of "blastphemy").

As per this post at the Center for Democracy and Technology, there's an ITU-T Recommendation "Y.2770: Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks", which is "restricted to TIES users", where "TIES (Telecommunication Information Exchange Service) is a set of networked information resources and services offered by ITU without any charge to ITU Members (Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and Academia) to support their participation in the activities of the Union." Not being a Member State, a Sector Member, an Associate, or a member of Academia, I have no idea what that recommendation says; it might be Very Nice if somebody who did have access to it were to upload it to wcitleaks.org.

Here's a list of countries that signed:
http://www.itu.int/osg/wcit-12/highlights/signatories.html

The ones in dark green (signatories) you would not want to live in.

It seems like the Final Acts of ITU at WCIT2012 will be remembered as crimes against humanity, no less. Read the act: http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Documents/final-acts-wcit-12.pdf If you'll realize the the consequences you'll get the real tragedy: Governmental supervision on content in the name of "security & anti-spam"; the 'Free-Riders' (Google , Facebook, AWS & likes) will keep 'riding' on our infrastructure paid by our taxes; no mention of net neutrality & freedom of content even. As I see it, despite all the american 'Woo-Ha', the USA sold our freedom to China & Russia against the green dollars of the 'Corps'. It's about time Google will listen to Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2011/09/02/google-needs-to-drop-its-do-no-evil-thing/ Sad day for our planet.

there's no song 'bout 112 from a group that got rocknrollfame? status, so it's easy to remember 'PE number 1'
(would be 731 tho as 3rd alternative, and.. perfectly in the corners
of the dtmf touchpads as well)
check E.161, it would even be as fast being dialled
on a rotary phone as 911.not beating 112 tho.
http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-E/recommendation.asp?lang=en&parent=T-REC-E.161

Except unfiltered audio power levels do not agree well with perceived loudness.

The ITU BS.1770 standard uses a spectral filter that a lot of research went into so that it agrees well with actual human perceived loudness.

Ad creators have known for a long time how to game simple compressors by putting more energy into higher frequencies where humans are more sensitive in terms of loudness.

There's already technical means to describe loudness. I hope they decided to use something like that instead of trying to use lawyer-speak.

From the official speech delivered by the ITU's secretary-general at the first Plenary of World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai last week:

We have the power to create a brave new world, where social and economic justice prevails – together.

And no, that quote is not taken out of context.

Actually it wasn't ignored, the ITU made sure the US goverment *mandated* the ITU/OSI protocol suite and *banned* the TCP/IP protocol suite for any interaction with the US government in 1991. By 93 this had come to seem as ridiculous even to the USG then as is it does now to you and this quietly went away.

When the very first transatlantic ITU-protocol OSI/X.25 link was put up the first thing that went over it was TCP/IP traffic. Why? Because there actually *was* some.

The sole accomplishment of the dude that spun the ITU and UN into this feeding frenzy for the net was a technical paper on how to write an X.400 email address on a business card. That's it. http://www.itu.int/itudoc/teltopic/x400/20656.txt

Previous to that he made Ethernet work in the ITU office, comically described in Carl Malamud's superb book wherein he tries to put the ITU technical specs online like the IETF's were. The general counsel at the time, the America technical genius (who set up the white house web server) / lawyer who started Internet Society, Dr. Tony Rutkowski, thought it was a swell idea, and since the rest of the ITU had never heard of the Internet they said "whatever" thinking it was some sort of CompuServe like thing. Then they found out some months later, and took them all down so they could figure out how best to deploy their information online - http://museum.media.org/eti/ http://museum.media.org/eti/Prologue01.html and more...

Rutkowski wrote a paper recently pointing out it would be best if the ITU were sort of, um, turned off. http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120816_privatizing_the_itu_t_back_to_the_future/

1. Unique identifiers for Internet users or their computers
2. Separate "service classes" for servers and client computers
3. A system of fees, surcharges, etc.
4. Special licensing for providing particular kinds of Internet services

These are the sort of things that, despite intense pressure from various industries, we have not seen on the Internet as controlled by ICANN. Sure, we've seen some censorship, but at the end of the day I can still use PGP and I can still run my own mail server, and I can do so without needing to obtain anyone's permission. This morning I ssh'd to my mother's computer to help troubleshoot a problem she was having -- and nothing stopped me, despite the fact that her computer is connected to the Internet through a "consumer grade" cable package.

ITU has a long history of designing communications systems that cement the power of monopoly service providers and which prevent people from hacking or coming up with their own solutions to problems. ITU's approach to the telephone network reflects its mindset; likewise with ITU's approach to radio. Amateurs? Hackers? You're lucky to get a tiny bit of space to play in, but you better not do anything that could threaten the big boys who provide "real" service to consumers.

To put it another way, if ITU had designed the Internet, there would never have been Google, because there would have been too much paperwork to fill out, too many licensing fees, and too many bandwidth fees to make something experimental like that work. The Internet's most important design feature is not packet switching, it is the idea that all computers connected to the Internet can do the same things, limited only by technical things like CPU or connection speeds. ITU doesn't design that sort of network; ITU designs this sort of network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25

Here, by the way, is ITU's next generation Internet plan:

http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/gsi/ngn/Pages/default.aspx

I read through the very early draft: http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Documents/draft-future-itrs-public.pdf

It seems like the focus is mainly compensation structure and what obligations exist for telcos passing traffic through. Content provisions are light. For example

Member States are encouraged:
a) to adopt national legislation to act against spam;
b) to cooperate to take actions to counter spam;
c) to exchange information on national findings/actions to counter spam.

This is a crucial treaty in the way the public water system is crucial to public welfare. Its existence is a matter of public interest, the details of implementation not so much. Most people want their messages to pass but don't really care how telcos pass expenses around.

Actually, the International Teleocmmunications Regulations, revision of which fall within the ITU mandate, are one of the few binding treaties out there.

Of course, as pointed out below, US constitution is much more deferential, in theory, to the enforceability of treaties to which the US is a signatory in local law, so not really something constitution-loving Americans can be genuinely offended by...

They* can make it stop working over their wires. Got a spare TAT-14?
* http://www.itu.int/online/mm/scripts/mm.list?_search=SEC&_languageid=1

Perhaps I wasn't clear: + is not a stand in for a prefix.

International Telecommunications Union Recommendation E.123 says otherwise:

6 Diallable symbols

A diallable symbol is a symbol which is to be dialled and appears on a telephone set to designate either a finger hole of a dial or a push button of a keyset[2[. These symbols can be digits, letters, or other signs. Some desirable properties to be considered when selecting diallable symbols are listed in Annex A.

7 Procedural symbols

A procedural symbol is a symbol which tells the subscriber how to dial. Such symbols should not appear in a finger hole or on a push button because they are not to be dialled.

7.1 International prefix symbol

The international prefix symbol should be + (plus) and should precede the country code in the international number. It serves to remind the subscriber to dial the international prefix which differs from country to country and also serves to identify the number following as the international telephone number.

Perhaps some phones allow you to press a "+" key to enter your current locale's international prefix (especially on mobile phones, where a trip might change what that prefix is), but I know of no telephone networks where the only way to make an international call requires that you enter a "+" key.

It's an actual character that you can enter on a cellphone, or on a VOIP phone.

...as well as being a "procedural symbol" used in "international telephone numbers ... on letterheads, business cards, bills, etc." (to quote the Summary of E.123).

I haven't looked into the standards, but presumably ISDN handles + as well

Well, E.164 says, in Annex B "Application of international ITU-T E.164-numbers for ISDN"

B.4 Dialling procedures

B.4.1 The subscriber dialling procedures for local, national and international calls shall be in accordance with clause 7. ...

but that doesn't say anything about the international prefix, perhaps because the international prefix is country-dependent and the digit analysis required to recognize the international prefix is also country-dependent.

What happens inside the network is not necessarily relevant to what people dial.

and surely SS7 does

People don't directly talk to SS7 - again, what happens inside the network is not necessarily relevant to what people dial.

Several evolved 3G standards are allowed to be called 4G according to the ITU. Keep in mind that LTE itself is also a 3GPP standard, introduced in 3GPP version 10. To get true 4G you would need LTE Advanced, which is not available anywhere afaik.

It's fine to stick to your guns and say Dual-Cell HSDPA is not 4G, but then LTE isn't either.

Some starting references:
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/48.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G

Don't buy anything that requires a non-standard data cable, such as micro USB.

Micro USB is non-standard? It's now the ITU-approved standard for mobile phone power, replacing the horrible range of proprietary plugs that preceded it. It's royalty-free, as far as I can tell. What do you suggest as an alternative, and how is it superior?

Yes, indeed. The gettimeofday() function should be used only when you need the time of day.

So what do I use if I need the time of day in UTC as specified by ITU-R TF.460-6? I.e., what do I use to get the time of day in a form such that

2 Leap-seconds

2.1 A positive or negative leap-second should be the last second of a UTC month, but first preference should be given to the end of December and June, and second preference to the end of March and September.

2.2 A positive leap-second begins at 23h 59m 60s and ends at 0h 0m 0s of the first day of the following month. In the case of a negative leap-second, 23h 59m 58s will be followed one second later by 0h 0m 0s of the first day of the following month (see Annex 3).

applies, complete with the clock going from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00 the next day when a positive leap second occurs and going from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00 the next day when a negative leap second occurs?

Hint: the answer does not involve using any API in the Single UNIX Specification. The answer might involve a combination of an API that returns a count of elapsed seconds of real time since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC - which is NOT the same as "Seconds Since the Epoch" as defined in the Single UNIX Specification, as the latter doesn't just count seconds over leap seconds - and an API that acts like the gmtime() in the Olson sample code when used with an Olson database file that includes leap seconds.

(Note that the formula in the Single UNIX Specification's definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch" - section 4.15 in "Base Definitions" in the current version of the SUS - can give the same value for "Seconds Since the Epoch" for two different "Coordinated Universal Time names"; the formula

tm_sec + tm_min *60 + tm_hour *3600 + tm_yday *86400 +
( tm_year -70)*31536000 + (( tm_year -69)/4)*86400 -
(( tm_year -1)/100)*86400 + (( tm_year +299)/400)*86400

will give the same value for XXXX-XX-XX 23:59:60 and {XXXX-XX-XX + one day} 00:00:00, so that the clock sticks during a positive leap second; that's why you can't turn "Seconds Since the Epoch" into what the SUS calls a "Coordinated Universal Time name" and always get the correct "Coordinated Universal Time name".)

(And, no, CLOCK_MONOTONIC won't do it, as that's time "since some unspecified starting point", so only differences between CLOCK_MONOTONIC values are meaningful. I can has CLOCK_REALTIME_BUT_NOT_FUCKED_UP_BY_LEAP_SECOND_POSIX_CRAP?)

The most recognized standards are those you need to pay for.

Except for the ones that aren't those you need to pay for and the ones that used to be those you need to pay for, but aren't any more.

Sounds good, but how do you define "volume?" Peak decibels? RMS power of the signal? Average volume?

The CALM Act references ATSC A/85 which uses loudness measurement using the ITU-R BS.1770 recommendation.

For long-form material, the expectation of professional mixers is to keep the anchor element (usually speech, but could be music in an all-music program) at constant loudness. Short-form material is generally analyzed as a whole.

Since this is Slashdot, I'll share some details on the problem of measuring loudness.

Loudness is difficult to measure objectively, because loudness is what a human experiences when listening to audio. Intensity, on the other hand, is easy to measure; just get a sound level meter.

Why is loudness different than intensity? Because the human auditory system contains a natural filterbank that divides incoming audio up into multiple bands, and then applies an exponential scaling function to each band. Old books and papers call these bands critical bands; I think the more modern concept is ERBs.

For sounds that hit only one band, such as a pure sine tone, the intensity of the sound is a good approximation of loudness. But sounds that hit multiple bands scale roughly linearly in the number of bands hit. I'll give an example.

If you generate a pure sine tone at power level X, and then generate two sine tones each at power level X/2, then the measured intensity will be identical. However, if the two sine tones are in different bands, the loudness will be nearly double.

So, as a rule of thumb, the more frequency bands a given sound hits, the louder it is at any given power level. Something that sounds like white noise will be louder than something that sounds like a clear bell tone or a single flute note.

The people who make commercials know how to game the system. I'm pretty sure that there were already limits on measured intensity of commercials, but that wasn't enough to solve the problem.

Imagine you are driving along, listening to a radio show. Maybe talk radio, maybe NPR, whatever. You have the "volume control" knob on your car radio set to a comfortable listening level. The radio show only has audio at typical human speech frequencies, and isn't trying to sound loud. Now comes the commercial, which smears its audio all over the spectrum; it puts processing on the voice, with reverb and stuff. "Sunday Sunday Sunday-y-y-y!!!! M-m-monster truck demolition derby!!!" or whatever. It's not your imagination, it really is louder. But a sound level meter might say it's the same as the radio show content, or only slightly higher intensity level.

The company for which I work (DTS) has a solution to the problem called "Neural Loudness Control", and there is a white paper available that really goes into detail about this stuff, so you don't need to stop with my lame explanation. NLC has a full "loudness model" that approximates the human auditory system when computing a loudness metric; but it also can operate in a mode that follows the new standard.

Also, here's a PowerPoint presentation by JJ Johnston about loudness vs. intensity.

So the new standard, 1770, is a pretty easy-to-calculate approximation of loudness. You apply two filters: one that simulates the transfer function of an average human head, and the "RLB weighting curve"; then compute mean-square energy on the result. This is simple enough that nobody really has an excuse in the 21st Century that it would be hard to comply.

I'm a little worried that it is too simple, and there might be ways to trick it. For example, it doesn't seem to handle audio that is smeared across multiple bands to make it sound louder. But I'm not actually working in the area of loudness measurement, and from what I've heard, 1770 works okay for most stuff. It's better than no standard.

And on the gripping hand, 1770 is the law now.

steveha

Do you think the US wouldn't be allowed to talk to other countries or make deals?

Given that the International Telecommunication Union is a UN agency, I'd say you would at least have to turn up in person.