The situation in Italy is interesting, because
except some particular places like bowling pools
arcade and pinball machines are almost vanished,
replaced with a sort of electronic slot macines.
The technology of these is quite simple: I think
they use 80386 CPU and VGA-like displays, or even
Z80 systems, so they are cheaper than a regular arcade systems, and there are people that enjoy more these machine than a pinball.
(Personally If I have to spend 1 EUR betting, I prefer betting on soccer results, because you
can win 2.000.000 EUR with an 1 EUR bet, and not
2 EUR).
So except on places like bowling pools, that have to have expensive systems anyway, arcade system are slowly dyning here.
The problem is that a specialized unit, has better perfomance compared to a general purpose unit of the same price.
The normal advice on hi-fi forums on magazine is:
Don't buy a DVD Player if you are mainly interested to listen CD's, pecause the ADC converterters are of lower quality, the video circuits could generate hum on audio outputs,
and normally a DVD player is more difficult to use. For loudspeakers and power amolifier, remember that you have six (eight? ten?) channel instead of two, so for the same quality you have to pay three four times more than a regular stereo amplifier'
Anyway 'real audiophiles' don't care if the CD
player is built ina 19" aluminum rack or in a
iron case painted ing gray, or in a wooden case.
The CD player has to play well.
This sound like the proposed (And used) PAL Plus
transmission. On a regular PAL satellite broadcast
was added an 'hidden' digital stream to enhance details of the analog signal.
This was abandoned because in a single PAL channel
you can transmit up to 16 MPEG2-encoded TV signals.
Macrovision site is unreacheable, so I have
not read their press release.
I think this thing is not useable for a lot
of reasons.
First of all VHS macovision found an exploit
into VHS recording system and used it. Most
of VHS equipement was affected by this exploit,
but professional beta and 8mm equipement was not
affected.
On the other hand, having a protection scheme
that permits the digital stream output of a
CD and scrambles data audio extraction on
current hardware is quite a difficult task.
Remember that a CD-audio has to follow red Book
rules and be readable from any CD player.
You can store quicktime audio on an HFS formatted
CD, but that is not a CD-audio.
Another important aspect is that Philips is
not a member of RIAA/MPAA/whatever: ie. is
mildly interested to enforce on their hardware
content-control mechanisms, if not dictated from
license agreement (ie. DVD). SACD is another question, and IMHO is the 2000`s Elcaset.
If they (and Sony, and Teac) make cd-/cd-rw
units is strange they will insert unnecessary
content-control measaures, due the huge installed
base and software existing.
Finally recording industries killed a medium that
was almost uncopiable, with a high added value,
and difficult to steal in a shop.
Is made normally in black plastic, round with standard diameters of 7", 10" and 12, difficult to steal from a shop and his angular velocity is
33.33 or 45.16 rpm (altrough some of there run
at 16.67 or 78.81 rpm, or speed up to 100 rpm.
Why they decided to reduce to a small percentage the LP market?
About Tesla, Popoff, Hertz, maxwell, Righi and other scientits that have pioneered the field
of radio transmission, there is the fact that
they never build a long distance system with
a transmitter and a receiver.
Other experimenters made things to be used
in a laboratory, and almost not useful in
real life.
Marconi, in fact invented the antenna (guess
why the term is the same in italian and english?)
especially the transmitting antenna.
Popoff experimented on antennas user with receiver, but never built a transmitter.
>used to wonder this, too. I believe the idea is that a watermark-aware device
>(like a future version of the Diamond Rio) simply won't make a
>copy of a watermarked source.
Quite interesting 'professional' DAT machines and audio CD burners don't follow the copy bit restricrion (see for instance TASCAM). Ant the higher cost (about 1500 EUR) is justified by the truckload of digital and analog interfaces have.
Disclaimer: I have no relation with thascam except a friend of mine borrowed me a TASCAM DAT machine, and is impressive .
I have an old GSM cellphone (bought 3 years ago). I have also a Fiat Panda car (http://www.fiat.com/eng/vorrei/showroom/panda/). On the cellphone user manual is clearly written that is not advisable to take long calls on cellphone because it could increase the eye's temperature, do not use in hospitals or nearby people with pace-makers. It is also written that if you use the cellphone in the car, is better to stop if you don not have installed the hands free/RF linear amplifier/external aerial system.
On the Panda's user manual (that is a 20-year old project of a low cost car) is clearly written that you must not use a cellphone inside while driving, if is not hands free and has an external aerial.
So, please, before use a cellphone on the left lane at 120 mph, please, RTFM!
I have a dual LPG/Gasoline car. When I use it with LPG I lose 20 HP (respect the 135 HP with gasoline). The LPG tank have to be retrofitted but taxes on LPG are lower than the one on gasoline in Italy. There are also some cars that are equipped in factory with Methane tanks. So the alternative is feasible, and works well, of course you have to make some maintenance, and you can't park (with LPG) in underground parkings.
Better of all, sometimes happened that a diaphony on the number station was the national broadcast of a Central American Country, I don't remember if was Nicaragua or Cuba.
Il centro museale di storia degli elaboratori, situato a Moffet Field di Mountain view, presenta una conferenza intitolata: 'Cluster PC di tipo Beouwulf: una visione storica', con la presenza di Thomas Sterling, capo del gruppo di lavoro della NASA che creo` il primo Cluster Beowulf e co-autore di 'Come costruire un Beowulf'. La conferenza si svolgera` la sera del 13 aprile. E' necessario dare conferma entro il 10 di aprile. Tutte le manifestazioni del centro museale di storia degli elaboratori cui ho partecipato sono state assai ben fatte.
AFIAK most hig-end 'Made in Germany' VCRS, have the possibility to pause the recording when a commercial starts and restart at the end of commercial. These model have also a teletext decoder that permit the programming of recordings using some special teletext pages, and if the selected program is delayed or prolonged (say a tennis match) they will record all the program delayng the start or the end of recording.
Is clear that for this system to work reliaby the broadcasters have to encode some data on the transmission in the teletext stream to inform the VCR what is happening.
In Italy broadcasters don't trasmit these signals, and for that matter sometimes they publish teletext pages with wrong programs, and of course these are not compatible with the german style.
There il a little problem, IMHO. Rowenta made a steam iron with plastic parts in various transparent color, and one was transparent and aqua. I own the gray/transparent model. The problem is that if you don't use the same exact design you could almost copy the designo of a thing, if there is no patent on it. This is because the rear lights of Mercedes' cars have the unique squared pattern and Opel and Ford have very similar rear lights.
I had bought an hard disc on internet. The price was 150 euro (more or less) plus 30 euro of VAT. In EU there is a taxation on internet sales. I bought SuSE 6.3 in a bookshop. If I'll buy next version on line on www.suse.de they charge me for VAT, in the same manner the bookstore charged me for VAT.
I think that if you buy something on internet, you have to follow the same taxation you have if you buy via snail mail, or on a shop, no more and no less.
The basic question is that the CD-audio player technology was developed *before* the CD-ROM reader technology, actually the CD-ROM are a clever hack based on audio gear. An audio CD reader has basically the reading and error correctin mechanism that provides a serial stream of bytes representing the audio data and a syncronyzation system. The serial data is then feed into the DAC. There are also sub channel informations but these are another serial stream normally sent to the microcontroller of the player and used to set indexes and so on. The CD-ROM hardware of the first readers was built over the audio gear, taking the digital stream and sending on the SCSI bus.
The audio stream is basically serial, not random access, like an analog record. To fit into the idea of computer how work a data devices they addess in the CD-ROM stream marks with begin and end of block and block number information. On audio CD there aren't such blocks(because audio is a serial stream). So is explained why older CD-ROM had great difficulty to read audio data, not finding the block marks they normally are loosing syncronysm after few frames. Newer CD are smarter and maybe can manage the sector syncronization before the ECC mechanism. The BMG not standard recording technique to prevent reading of their CD maybe garble the sector information before ECC, making more difficult for newer CD-ROM to remain in sync, and old CD-Audio players too, I think depend how ECC circutry manages errors on these units. On DVD they started to a digital format and added video data as files. Techically make a system like CD-Audio for CD video is more costly, because the data is compressed with a complex algorithm, requiring a powerful CPU, and not a simple DAC. But is feasible anyway (and useful, because you could see your favorite video on DVD even on a 486). And MPEG compressed data has less self-correlation respect an uncompressed audio stream, making tools like cdda2wav less able do deal with loss of sync.
Ok, let's see: me my dad still has a Technics SL-D1 turntable. And has also an old Technics CD player bought 10 years ago ar a price of $500. I think that my dad if after discovering that the CD will not work in theit CD player, changed it, still not work, when all other cds are readable, will ask for a 33 rpm disk. Then will make a cassette copy of the disc because he will also like to listen his lp on his car.
On my side, an SL-1210 costs $600 I think, and a good cartrige costs $200...
I'm agreeing with this. Getting out from the ISA bus coul be a good move, because a bus born with the 80286 @ 8 MHz is clearly a bottleneck. But have the possibility to use a PCI expansion board and have serial/parallel/keyboard port is a good thing. I have a 12 year-old dot matrix printer and a deskjet, both parallel. If I have to throw away them because I have to upgrade my PC, I'll refrain to upgrade a PC. Especially because I think nobody will build an USB dot matrix printer, and dmp are needed for multicopy modules.
I think USB only computer will have little success. I remember some tentatives about litte boxes without expansion capabilities, but they had little success.
The problem is that they hav not learned the lesson from the DAT experience. In the case of DAT, a simple copy bit made the use of it cumbersome and definitively unsuitable for home users. The professional DAT recorders among having variuous sampling rates, sample widths and high quality analog i/o, are not blocked by the copy bit. Maybe because a 39 cm/s open reel recorder has a good quality anyway. And the DAT cousin (aka DDS) for data storage has some limited success but is incompatible with audio format for technical reason (ie: if you use the DATA/DAT format you have to deal with TOC and some other things anc can't mt/tar so easily AFAIK).
Laserdisc is analog an not copy protected (was born before the audio CD) but has the same success of Betamax (except Pioneer's karaoke machine use Laserdisc). Make a modification on DVD's firmware, so old DVD will be obsolete, make a device suitable only for video reproduction, wait to computer manufacturer to switch to a similar format suitable for data incomatible with video DVD, et voila, you have another Laserdisc...
Then use the Computer DVD to stream satellite MPEG video into it...
If you are using Betamax, Video 2000 or 8 mm video tapes, Macrovison is ineffective, because exploits a flaw in vhs' recording method.
And then you could buy/build a sync restorer, a get away prom macrovision stuff (as a side effect you get better copies when the source tape is non perfect)
> Right! Redhat and Caldera (especially RedHat, > since they really want to keep their > distribution "free") still have the same > problems, because their "products" are open > sourced. Cute.
Ok: this make SuSE happy, isn't it? And for instance makes happier Software companies in Europe: the crypto laws of USA were a godsend for european software houses.
But anyway I downloades ssh from a server in Finland, ad I'll continue to download from it.
Yeah, I live in Italy and as terrestria PAL television I could see both MTV Italy, and Videomusic (that is a 100% italian music channel, owned by Cecchi Gori Filmmakers' family). Videomusic has the problem that is used to send all the trash movies that Checchi Gori have TV rights and nobody want to transmit, and some oddball soccer/rugby/volley matches. But the manned video transmissions are quite interesting (especially the ones on metal, but this is a personal preference). Unmanned transmission is made with a big RAID, with the 40 or so most pushed videos and ads, and choosed randomly... but is better than a monoscope. MTV OTOH make always boring probrams, and more boring transission (with some excetions, but those are ITALIAN transmission made in Milan).
Not to mention VIVA or MCM (with their quirks, but is known that music tastes in Germany and France are um... odd).
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, maybe I have to write a system like this to start/stop a bunch of betacam VCRs!
I hope to find a decent documentation on protocols.
(Personally If I have to spend 1 EUR betting, I prefer betting on soccer results, because you can win 2.000.000 EUR with an 1 EUR bet, and not 2 EUR).
So except on places like bowling pools, that have to have expensive systems anyway, arcade system are slowly dyning here.
The problem is that a specialized unit, has better perfomance compared to a general purpose unit of the same price.
The normal advice on hi-fi forums on magazine is: Don't buy a DVD Player if you are mainly interested to listen CD's, pecause the ADC converterters are of lower quality, the video circuits could generate hum on audio outputs, and normally a DVD player is more difficult to use. For loudspeakers and power amolifier, remember that you have six (eight? ten?) channel instead of two, so for the same quality you have to pay three four times more than a regular stereo amplifier'
Anyway 'real audiophiles' don't care if the CD player is built ina 19" aluminum rack or in a iron case painted ing gray, or in a wooden case. The CD player has to play well.
This sound like the proposed (And used) PAL Plus
transmission. On a regular PAL satellite broadcast
was added an 'hidden' digital stream to enhance details of the analog signal.
This was abandoned because in a single PAL channel
you can transmit up to 16 MPEG2-encoded TV signals.
Macrovision site is unreacheable, so I have not read their press release.
I think this thing is not useable for a lot of reasons.
First of all VHS macovision found an exploit into VHS recording system and used it. Most of VHS equipement was affected by this exploit, but professional beta and 8mm equipement was not affected.
On the other hand, having a protection scheme that permits the digital stream output of a CD and scrambles data audio extraction on current hardware is quite a difficult task. Remember that a CD-audio has to follow red Book rules and be readable from any CD player. You can store quicktime audio on an HFS formatted CD, but that is not a CD-audio.
Another important aspect is that Philips is not a member of RIAA/MPAA/whatever: ie. is mildly interested to enforce on their hardware content-control mechanisms, if not dictated from license agreement (ie. DVD). SACD is another question, and IMHO is the 2000`s Elcaset. If they (and Sony, and Teac) make cd-/cd-rw units is strange they will insert unnecessary content-control measaures, due the huge installed base and software existing.
Finally recording industries killed a medium that was almost uncopiable, with a high added value, and difficult to steal in a shop.
Is made normally in black plastic, round with standard diameters of 7", 10" and 12, difficult to steal from a shop and his angular velocity is 33.33 or 45.16 rpm (altrough some of there run at 16.67 or 78.81 rpm, or speed up to 100 rpm.
Why they decided to reduce to a small percentage the LP market?
Can I Say Ghostscript?
This package is widely used under linux,
and new releases are launched with a non-GPL
license, then after six months or so were launched
under GPL.
I think nobody had to protest with this.
About Tesla, Popoff, Hertz, maxwell, Righi and other scientits that have pioneered the field
of radio transmission, there is the fact that
they never build a long distance system with
a transmitter and a receiver.
Other experimenters made things to be used
in a laboratory, and almost not useful in
real life.
Marconi, in fact invented the antenna (guess
why the term is the same in italian and english?)
especially the transmitting antenna.
Popoff experimented on antennas user with receiver, but never built a transmitter.
Mike (from Italy... Am I a bit biased, isn't it?)
>used to wonder this, too. I believe the idea is that a watermark-aware device
>(like a future version of the Diamond Rio) simply won't make a
>copy of a watermarked source.
Quite interesting 'professional' DAT machines and audio CD burners don't follow the copy bit restricrion (see for instance TASCAM). Ant the higher cost (about 1500 EUR) is justified by the truckload of digital and analog interfaces have.
Disclaimer: I have no relation with thascam except a friend of mine borrowed me a TASCAM DAT machine, and is impressive .
I have an old GSM cellphone (bought 3 years ago).
I have also a Fiat Panda car (http://www.fiat.com/eng/vorrei/showroom/panda/).
On the cellphone user manual is clearly written
that is not advisable to take long calls on cellphone because it could increase the eye's temperature, do not use in hospitals or nearby
people with pace-makers. It is also written
that if you use the cellphone in the car, is
better to stop if you don not have installed
the hands free/RF linear amplifier/external
aerial system.
On the Panda's user manual (that is a 20-year old
project of a low cost car) is clearly written
that you must not use a cellphone inside while
driving, if is not hands free and has an external aerial.
So, please, before use a cellphone on the left lane at 120 mph, please, RTFM!
Mike
I have a dual LPG/Gasoline car. When I use it
with LPG I lose 20 HP (respect the 135 HP with gasoline). The LPG tank have to be retrofitted but
taxes on LPG are lower than the one on gasoline
in Italy.
There are also some cars that are equipped in factory with Methane tanks.
So the alternative is feasible, and works well,
of course you have to make some maintenance,
and you can't park (with LPG) in underground parkings.
Standards by Fiat
- flog a new product/protocol, then define it as *THE* standard.
Now these standards are in partnership with
standard by General Motors, aren't they?
Better of all, sometimes happened that a diaphony
on the number station was the national broadcast
of a Central American Country, I don't remember if
was Nicaragua or Cuba.
Il centro museale di storia degli elaboratori, situato a Moffet Field di Mountain view, presenta una conferenza intitolata: 'Cluster PC di tipo Beouwulf: una visione storica', con la presenza di Thomas Sterling, capo del gruppo di lavoro della NASA che creo` il primo Cluster Beowulf e co-autore di 'Come costruire un Beowulf'. La conferenza si svolgera` la sera del 13 aprile. E' necessario dare conferma entro il 10 di aprile.
Tutte le manifestazioni del centro museale di storia degli elaboratori cui ho partecipato sono state assai ben fatte.
AFIAK most hig-end 'Made in Germany' VCRS, have the possibility to pause the recording when a commercial starts and restart at the end of commercial.
These model have also a teletext decoder that permit the programming of recordings using some special teletext pages, and if the selected program is delayed or prolonged (say a tennis match) they will record all the program delayng the start or the end of recording.
Is clear that for this system to work reliaby the broadcasters have to encode some data on the transmission in the teletext stream to inform the VCR what is happening.
In Italy broadcasters don't trasmit these signals, and for that matter sometimes they publish teletext pages with wrong programs, and of course these are not compatible with the german style.
There il a little problem, IMHO. Rowenta made a steam iron with plastic parts in various transparent color, and one was transparent and aqua. I own the gray/transparent model.
The problem is that if you don't use the same
exact design you could almost copy the designo of
a thing, if there is no patent on it.
This is because the rear lights of Mercedes' cars
have the unique squared pattern and Opel and Ford have very similar rear lights.
Mike
I had bought an hard disc on internet.
The price was 150 euro (more or less)
plus 30 euro of VAT.
In EU there is a taxation on internet sales.
I bought SuSE 6.3 in a bookshop. If I'll buy next
version on line on www.suse.de they charge me for VAT, in the same manner the bookstore charged me
for VAT.
I think that if you buy something on internet,
you have to follow the same taxation you have
if you buy via snail mail, or on a shop, no more
and no less.
The basic question is that the CD-audio player technology was developed *before* the CD-ROM reader technology, actually the CD-ROM are a clever hack based on audio gear.
An audio CD reader has basically the reading and error correctin mechanism that provides a serial stream of bytes representing the audio data and a syncronyzation system. The serial data is then feed into the DAC. There are also sub channel informations but these are another serial stream normally sent to the microcontroller of the player and used to set indexes and so on.
The CD-ROM hardware of the first readers was built over the audio gear, taking the digital stream and sending on the SCSI bus.
The audio stream is basically serial, not random access, like an analog record. To fit into the idea of computer how work a data devices they addess in the CD-ROM stream marks with begin and end of block and block number information.
On audio CD there aren't such blocks(because audio is a serial stream).
So is explained why older CD-ROM had great difficulty to read audio data, not finding the block marks they normally are loosing syncronysm after few frames.
Newer CD are smarter and maybe can manage the sector syncronization before the ECC mechanism. The BMG not standard recording technique to prevent reading of their CD maybe garble the sector information before ECC, making more difficult for newer CD-ROM to remain in sync, and old CD-Audio players too, I think depend how ECC circutry manages errors on these units.
On DVD they started to a digital format and added video data as files.
Techically make a system like CD-Audio for CD video is more costly, because the data is compressed with a complex algorithm, requiring a powerful CPU, and not a simple DAC. But is feasible anyway (and useful, because you could see your favorite video on DVD even on a 486).
And MPEG compressed data has less self-correlation respect an uncompressed audio stream, making tools like cdda2wav less able do deal with loss of sync.
Mike
Ok, let's see: me my dad still has a Technics SL-D1 turntable. And has also an old Technics CD player bought 10 years ago ar a price of $500.
I think that my dad if after discovering that the CD will not work in theit CD player, changed it, still not work, when all other cds are readable, will ask for a 33 rpm disk. Then will make a cassette copy of the disc because he will also like to listen his lp on his car.
On my side, an SL-1210 costs $600 I think, and a
good cartrige costs $200...
I'm agreeing with this. Getting out from the
ISA bus coul be a good move, because a bus born
with the 80286 @ 8 MHz is clearly a bottleneck.
But have the possibility to use a PCI expansion
board and have serial/parallel/keyboard port
is a good thing.
I have a 12 year-old dot matrix printer and a
deskjet, both parallel. If I have to throw away
them because I have to upgrade my PC, I'll
refrain to upgrade a PC. Especially because I
think nobody will build an USB dot matrix printer,
and dmp are needed for multicopy modules.
I think USB only computer will have little
success. I remember some tentatives about litte
boxes without expansion capabilities, but they
had little success.
The problem is that they hav not learned the lesson from the DAT experience. In the case of DAT, a simple copy bit made the use of it cumbersome and definitively unsuitable for home users. The professional DAT recorders among having variuous sampling rates, sample widths and high quality analog i/o, are not blocked by the copy bit. Maybe because a 39 cm/s open reel recorder has a good quality anyway.
And the DAT cousin (aka DDS) for data storage has
some limited success but is incompatible with audio format for technical reason (ie: if you use the DATA/DAT format you have to deal with TOC and some other things anc can't mt/tar so easily AFAIK).
Laserdisc is analog an not copy protected (was born before the audio CD) but has the same success of Betamax (except Pioneer's karaoke machine use
Laserdisc). Make a modification on DVD's firmware,
so old DVD will be obsolete, make a device suitable only for video reproduction, wait to computer manufacturer to switch to a similar format suitable for data incomatible with video DVD, et voila, you have another Laserdisc...
Then use the Computer DVD to stream satellite
MPEG video into it...
If you are using Betamax, Video 2000 or
8 mm video tapes, Macrovison is ineffective,
because exploits a flaw in vhs' recording method.
And then you could buy/build a sync restorer,
a get away prom macrovision stuff (as a side
effect you get better copies when the source
tape is non perfect)
In italian: barrapunto.
In Morse: A (or N, I'm not sure )
___ _
> Right! Redhat and Caldera (especially RedHat,
> since they really want to keep their
> distribution "free") still have the same
> problems, because their "products" are open
> sourced. Cute.
Ok: this make SuSE happy, isn't it?
And for instance makes happier Software companies
in Europe: the crypto laws of USA were a godsend
for european software houses.
But anyway I downloades ssh from a server in Finland, ad I'll continue to download from it.
Yeah, I live in Italy and as terrestria PAL
television I could see both MTV Italy, and
Videomusic (that is a 100% italian music channel,
owned by Cecchi Gori Filmmakers' family).
Videomusic has the problem that is used to send
all the trash movies that Checchi Gori have TV
rights and nobody want to transmit, and some
oddball soccer/rugby/volley matches.
But the manned video transmissions are quite interesting (especially the ones on metal, but
this is a personal preference).
Unmanned transmission is made with a big RAID,
with the 40 or so most pushed videos and ads,
and choosed randomly... but is better than a monoscope.
MTV OTOH make always boring probrams, and more
boring transission (with some excetions, but
those are ITALIAN transmission made in Milan).
Not to mention VIVA or MCM (with their quirks,
but is known that music tastes in Germany and France are um... odd).
Mike