Re:They used to be cool...
on
BYO Battlebot
·
· Score: 1
Back in the day about 4-5 years ago, before Comedy Central picked up on it, they had the Robot Wars competition in one large 4 or 6-hour event on the Discovery Channel. No sportscasters, stupid interviews, etc. It was thouroghly better than what they do today...and I think a bit of the rules about weapons and such were more relaxed.
I think you'll find Robot Wars is still going, even after all
the nonsense about who owned the name.
The most sensible analysis (from a UK perspective) of email disclaimers is on the
Stupid Email Disclaimers
web site. Its contains a bit of logical (and legal) analysis, some sample disclaimers and some parodies as well.
Someone pointed it out on an email list when the
Registers story first came out.
It might take 50 gigs to store at a good compression rate
I hate to tell you this, but the video and audio stored on a DVD is already compressed. While its possible
another step of compression will make it smaller, its also possible the data added by the compression will make it larger. Its a bit like zipping jpeg's.
Once analog signals are turned off and replaced completly with digital (I predict 5-10 years)
Last I heard, when they were just starting to roll out digital TV, here in the UK the plan was to stop broadcasting analogue in 2 years or so; that puts it mid 2002, if memory serves me.
But the actual uptake of digital TV has been slower than expected (and probably won't speed up until the BBC and ITV networks start doing terrestrial digital). I also remember that the last major switch off (425 line broadcasts) of signals in the UK was 20 years later than predicted.
Digital TV is here, now, in Europe. No built in copy control. Satellite, cable and broadcast digital television.
Copy control is built into the Digital Video Broadcasting spec. that European players are built to. Copy control is called Conditional Access. But all DVB spec. decoders must be able to play unencrypted content. The actual implementation of conditional access is usually down to a individual network (ie Sky Digital).
>The state of the UK ISP is a real mess. I have just
>moved house ( I live in Bristol )
Me too. FWIW where I live now has both a BT phone
line and a Telewest line. The Telewest line consistently
connects at 52 K, the BT line manages 28K. Whether
this is due to the Telewest being a newer connection
than the BT one I couldn't say.
>and I can't decide what the best company / route is
>for connectivity - DSL and cable modems are both
>real soon now vapourware in this part of the country,
>BT changes tack every two minutes , and smoke and
>mirrors tactics like this AV stuff make it even more
>confusing.
Stick to V90 modems. The market for broadband (and
unmetered) won't settle down until the local loop is
unbundled. Or find a friendly ISP in Bristol, get BT to
setup a 'bell wire' permanent connection between
you and the ISP. Bung a DSL modem on each end, and
hope you ISP has got plenty of bandwidth.
From the cable modem rollout it sounds like they could
have charged a lot more, particularly as there is no
competition from BT. The higher price would have get
demand down to level they could cope with.
Back on topic, couldn't Altavista's actions be described
as fraud?
No one else has mentioned this, but another book about the history of Unix is 'Life with Unix' subtitled 'A guide for everyone' by Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, ISBN 0-13-536657-7
PGP is not the answer (Score:2) >And as far as crypto goes, strong crypto is nice. But if you've ever read books on >information security that covered the whole field, you'd realize a very small chapter >would be devoted to crypto, and a very large chapter to organizational security because >social engineering and dumpster diving are both far easier than cracking crypto in most >cases. It's easier to pay a secretary $10K than to spend $100K cracking some crypto. >And probably more effective to boot.
But it is a lot harder to automate social engineering. Which requires field officers with some skill, and someone to type in the results.
>...spare a thought for those of us in the u.k. who (sometimes) buy a cd for around 17 pounds (probably about 30 dollars).
The last CD I bought in the uk, was for three for 18 ukp. But since I opened an account at amazon.com I haven't paid over 10 ukp for a single CD, including postage. Shame they don't get all the uk releases though.
Running the Distributed.net rc5 client on a G4 400 MHz (MacOS 9) with the altivec core was cranking out 3.5Mkey/s. Running the 'same' client on a Pentium III 500 MHz (Win NT 4) is storming along 1.4MKey/s. Which would imply the G4 is about 2.5 times as fast, while running 20% slower clock. Now all I need is a dual G4 system with linux pre-installed, a linuc rc5 client that uses altivec, and getting rid of those noisey fans would be nice...
>I would think that in fact the average person has no use for cryptography in their daily lives. I >don't mostly because I really don't know anyone and have never had the need to use >communications media to interact with individuals in a private way. Generally I think that if I >have a choice between using cryptography or going to prison I will choice to not use it.
A quick bit of background for you:-
The credit card laws for fraud in the UK are slightly different than in the US. In as much as you can be liable for all of the bill before you cancelled the card. Particularly if the purchases were made abroad.
While giving your credit card number over the internet is no more risky than giving it over the phone. It is easier to setup a scanner on tcp/ip than on voice traffic. Although I hear the NSA are working on this. Couple that with e-commerce servers getting cracked and the whole un-encypted e-commerce side of things looks somewhat risky.
Ultimately this law is about the Police and more likely GCHQ are worried they are going to lose a very convienent way of spying on people, and that they are going to have to go back to old fashioned leg work.
See http://teaser.ieee.org/pubs/spectrum/9910/dvd.html for technical details of the DVD standard. It'll tell you all you need to know. Apart from blank writable DVD's costing more than DVD movies.
Linked off the http://www.opendvd.org 's press coverage.
>Otherwise the sound, not being directly on either side of you all along is going to be processed as >coming from a certain direction, on top of the processing done by the card. So it won't work quite >right.
Funnily enough you actual hear in 3D. There is a system built to do this, following on from the research into hearing by a chap at Oxford University, a web search on Ambisonics will find it. Unforunately Dobly 5.1 is much more popular, possibly because Ambisonics usually recommend an eight speaker set up for a fuller flavour.
>Speaking of which... With 5:1 sound, do all channels take the same ammount of space? If you've got >a channel that you're only going to send to a woofer, does it need the same fidelity as the high >frequency channel? If a woofer is for 20-1000Hz, couldn't you same it at 2khz, or 4khz to avoid >aliasing problems, and at a probably lower bit depth too? (Woofers don't seem like they'd be as high >fidelity as the mids and uppers.)
Funnily enough it uses five full rate audio feeds for front centre, front left, front right, rear left and rear right. Plus a limited rate feed for the sub-woofer. Which is where the 5.1 label comes from.
>From where in the world will they be visible? >Will I be able to see this shower from Oxford, England at, say, 3 or 4 in the morning?
Yes, the best time is supposed to be about 3am GMT.
Its worth getting into the countryside to avoid the light pollution from street lights. I think I'll be visiting friends in the sticks south of Bristol.
>Does anybody know why the gyroscopes failed, or what plans are being made to avoid the same >problem when they are serviced?
Satellites have a hard life, they sit in a hostile environment. Couple that with being built as one offs by scientists and you get failures. Very few sattelites survive being launched without something breaking. Once in orbit bizarre chemical reactions, extremes of heat and cold and particle collision all add to the failure rate. That's why it had six gyro's in the first place, so that a single failure wouldn't put the satellite out of commision.
>Will there be any problems with the telescope while it's in safe mode?
I wouldn't have thought so, they probably won't be able to point the telescope at anything they want to though.
The gyroscopes are used to measure where the satellite is pointing, in rotational terms. A lot of satellites use a small telescope to pinpoint a particular star to keep themselves accurately aligned, and can get away with fewer gyro's. IIRC one of the ESA satellites was down to one gyro and is still working. They had to upload a new software build to control the satellite with fewer gyro's, though.
I would expect the Hubble telescope is designed to be able to look at the whole of the sky it could use a fixed point of reference but it would reduce the telescopes usefullness.
IIRC the 8VSB v COFDM won't affect you, they are both standards for broadcasting digital TV via groundbased transmitters. Cable uses QAM modulation and as such if your cable firm switches to using digital you'll need a different cable box that converts QAM to digital picture to NTSC that your TV will understand. Digital TV isn't such a big deal for cable companies since the main advantage of digital TV is the increase in channels for a given bandwidth. Cable already provides a lot of channels. Digital cable should provide approx 500 or so video feeds.
IIRC, DVD video encoding is a variant of MPEG-2, i.e. it uses time based compression between frames as well as compression of the frames themselves. So it should return a better compression ratio than MPEG-1. That coupled with the fact that DVD movies are probably stored at a resolution of 576 pixels high by 720 pixels wide, would mean that an MPEG-1 encoded picture at 400x300 would take up roughly the same space. A good guality MPEG-2 video feed usually takes 8mbits/s, so a two hour film would fill 7200 mega bytes. Hence the requirement to save it on a DVD disk in the first place. So I don't think re-encoding it at a lower resolution using MPEG-1 will be practical.
After all if your happy with 400x300 why not use a super VHS video to tape the output of your DVD player.
I suspect your going in the wrong direction. IIRC the GSM standard pre-dates the TDMA and CDMA.
The ETU (European Telecoms Union) adopted the GSM standard that a collection of manufacturers, interested parties, etc had put together. A bit like MPEG. I think the European companies have a more diverse market, so appreciate the value of standards. Especially if it leads to cheap standardised hardware that everyone can use.
I think the TDMA and CDMA were developed in the USA after GSM. Possibly prompted by a 'not invented here' attitude. AFAIK CDMA and TDMA are technically superior to GSM, but GSM has the advantage in that more networks use it. Allowing one handset to be used in more places, and cheaper hardware through mass production.
Now all we need is Sony to put a modem on it, and a TCP/IP stack. Then distributed.net to port an RC5 client on it and we're laughing. Particularly if they sell it for as much as a playstation.
I thought the main reason HDTV hs never taken off, was no demand. The companies producing (or planning to) HDTV did 'blind' [1] screenings with viewers to see what they preferred. Regular TV with better sound was judged to be better than HDTV with regular sound. HDTV with better sound was judged just as good as regular TV with better sound.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day about 4-5 years ago, before Comedy Central picked up on it, they had the Robot Wars competition in one large 4 or 6-hour event on the Discovery Channel. No sportscasters, stupid interviews, etc. It was thouroghly better than what they do today...and I think a bit of the rules about weapons and such were more relaxed.
I think you'll find Robot Wars is still going, even after all the nonsense about who owned the name.
See also robotwars.com and SMIDSY
The most sensible analysis (from a UK perspective) of email disclaimers is on the Stupid Email Disclaimers web site. Its contains a bit of logical (and legal) analysis, some sample disclaimers and some parodies as well.
Someone pointed it out on an email list when the Registers story first came out.
It might take 50 gigs to store at a good compression rate
I hate to tell you this, but the video and audio stored on a DVD is already compressed. While its possible another step of compression will make it smaller, its also possible the data added by the compression will make it larger. Its a bit like zipping jpeg's.
Once analog signals are turned off and replaced completly with digital (I predict 5-10 years)
Last I heard, when they were just starting to roll out digital TV, here in the UK the plan was to stop broadcasting analogue in 2 years or so; that puts it mid 2002, if memory serves me.
But the actual uptake of digital TV has been slower than expected (and probably won't speed up until the BBC and ITV networks start doing terrestrial digital). I also remember that the last major switch off (425 line broadcasts) of signals in the UK was 20 years later than predicted.
Digital TV is here, now, in Europe. No built in copy control. Satellite, cable and broadcast digital television.
Copy control is built into the Digital Video Broadcasting spec. that European players are built to. Copy control is called Conditional Access. But all DVB spec. decoders must be able to play unencrypted content. The actual implementation of conditional access is usually down to a individual network (ie Sky Digital).
>The state of the UK ISP is a real mess. I have just
>moved house ( I live in Bristol )
Me too. FWIW where I live now has both a BT phone
line and a Telewest line. The Telewest line consistently
connects at 52 K, the BT line manages 28K. Whether
this is due to the Telewest being a newer connection
than the BT one I couldn't say.
>and I can't decide what the best company / route is
>for connectivity - DSL and cable modems are both
>real soon now vapourware in this part of the country,
>BT changes tack every two minutes , and smoke and
>mirrors tactics like this AV stuff make it even more
>confusing.
Stick to V90 modems. The market for broadband (and
unmetered) won't settle down until the local loop is
unbundled. Or find a friendly ISP in Bristol, get BT to
setup a 'bell wire' permanent connection between
you and the ISP. Bung a DSL modem on each end, and
hope you ISP has got plenty of bandwidth.
From the cable modem rollout it sounds like they could
have charged a lot more, particularly as there is no
competition from BT. The higher price would have get
demand down to level they could cope with.
Back on topic, couldn't Altavista's actions be described
as fraud?
Cheers
David
No one else has mentioned this, but another book about the history of Unix is 'Life with Unix' subtitled 'A guide for everyone' by Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, ISBN 0-13-536657-7
PGP is not the answer (Score:2)
>And as far as crypto goes, strong crypto is nice. But if you've ever read books on
>information security that covered the whole field, you'd realize a very small chapter
>would be devoted to crypto, and a very large chapter to organizational security because
>social engineering and dumpster diving are both far easier than cracking crypto in most
>cases. It's easier to pay a secretary $10K than to spend $100K cracking some crypto.
>And probably more effective to boot.
But it is a lot harder to automate social engineering. Which requires field officers with some skill, and someone to type in the results.
>...spare a thought for those of us in the u.k. who (sometimes) buy a cd for around 17 pounds (probably about 30 dollars).
The last CD I bought in the uk, was for three for 18 ukp. But since I opened an account at amazon.com I haven't paid over 10 ukp for a single CD, including postage. Shame they don't get all the uk releases though.
Running the Distributed.net rc5 client on a G4 400 MHz (MacOS 9) with the altivec core was cranking out 3.5Mkey/s. Running the 'same' client on a Pentium III 500 MHz (Win NT 4) is storming along 1.4MKey/s. Which would imply the G4 is about 2.5 times as fast, while running 20% slower clock.
Now all I need is a dual G4 system with linux pre-installed, a linuc rc5 client that uses altivec, and getting rid of those noisey fans would be nice...
>I would think that in fact the average person has no use for cryptography in their daily lives. I
>don't mostly because I really don't know anyone and have never had the need to use
>communications media to interact with individuals in a private way. Generally I think that if I
>have a choice between using cryptography or going to prison I will choice to not use it.
A quick bit of background for you:-
The credit card laws for fraud in the UK are slightly different than in the US. In as much as you can be liable for all of the bill before you cancelled the card. Particularly if the purchases were made abroad.
While giving your credit card number over the internet is no more risky than giving it over the phone. It is easier to setup a scanner on tcp/ip than on voice traffic. Although I hear the NSA are working on this. Couple that with e-commerce servers getting cracked and the whole un-encypted e-commerce side of things looks somewhat risky.
Ultimately this law is about the Police and more likely GCHQ are worried they are going to lose a very convienent way of spying on people, and that they are going to have to go back to old fashioned leg work.
David
See http://teaser.ieee.org/pubs/spectrum/9910/dvd.html for technical details of the DVD standard. It'll tell you all you need to know. Apart from blank writable DVD's costing more than DVD movies.
Linked off the http://www.opendvd.org 's press coverage.
>Otherwise the sound, not being directly on either side of you all along is going to be processed as
>coming from a certain direction, on top of the processing done by the card. So it won't work quite
>right.
Funnily enough you actual hear in 3D. There is a system built to do this, following on from the research into hearing by a chap at Oxford University, a web search on Ambisonics will find it. Unforunately Dobly 5.1 is much more popular, possibly because Ambisonics usually recommend an eight speaker set up for a fuller flavour.
>Speaking of which... With 5:1 sound, do all channels take the same ammount of space? If you've got
>a channel that you're only going to send to a woofer, does it need the same fidelity as the high
>frequency channel? If a woofer is for 20-1000Hz, couldn't you same it at 2khz, or 4khz to avoid
>aliasing problems, and at a probably lower bit depth too? (Woofers don't seem like they'd be as high
>fidelity as the mids and uppers.)
Funnily enough it uses five full rate audio feeds for front centre, front left, front right, rear left and rear right. Plus a limited rate feed for the sub-woofer. Which is where the 5.1 label comes from.
>From where in the world will they be visible?
>Will I be able to see this shower from Oxford, England at, say, 3 or 4 in the morning?
Yes, the best time is supposed to be about 3am GMT.
Its worth getting into the countryside to avoid the light pollution from street lights. I think I'll be visiting friends in the sticks south of Bristol.
>Does anybody know why the gyroscopes failed, or what plans are being made to avoid the same
>problem when they are serviced?
Satellites have a hard life, they sit in a hostile environment. Couple that with being built as one offs by scientists and you get failures. Very few sattelites survive being launched without something breaking. Once in orbit bizarre chemical reactions, extremes of heat and cold and particle collision all add to the failure rate. That's why it had six gyro's in the first place, so that a single failure wouldn't put the satellite out of commision.
>Will there be any problems with the telescope while it's in safe mode?
I wouldn't have thought so, they probably won't be able to point the telescope at anything they want to though.
The gyroscopes are used to measure where the satellite is pointing, in rotational terms. A lot
of satellites use a small telescope to pinpoint a particular star to keep themselves accurately aligned, and can get away with fewer gyro's. IIRC one of the ESA satellites was down to one gyro and is still working. They had to upload a new software build to control the satellite with fewer gyro's, though.
I would expect the Hubble telescope is designed to be able to look at the whole of the sky it could use a fixed point of reference but it would reduce the telescopes usefullness.
Black and white film at ten.
IIRC the 8VSB v COFDM won't affect you, they are both standards for broadcasting digital TV via groundbased transmitters. Cable uses QAM modulation and as such if your cable firm switches to using digital you'll need a different cable box that converts QAM to digital picture to NTSC that your TV will understand. Digital TV isn't such a big deal for cable companies since the main advantage of digital TV is the increase in channels for a given bandwidth. Cable already provides a lot of channels. Digital cable should provide approx 500 or so video feeds.
IIRC, DVD video encoding is a variant of MPEG-2, i.e. it uses time based compression between frames as well as compression of the frames themselves. So it should return a better compression ratio than MPEG-1. That coupled with the fact that DVD movies are probably stored at a resolution of 576 pixels high by 720 pixels wide, would mean that an MPEG-1 encoded picture at 400x300 would take up roughly the same space. A good guality MPEG-2 video feed usually takes 8mbits/s, so a two hour film would fill 7200 mega bytes. Hence the requirement to save it on a DVD disk in the first place. So I don't think re-encoding it at a lower
resolution using MPEG-1 will be practical.
After all if your happy with 400x300 why not use a super VHS video to tape the output of your DVD player.
I suspect your going in the wrong direction. IIRC the GSM standard pre-dates the TDMA and CDMA.
The ETU (European Telecoms Union) adopted the GSM standard that a collection of manufacturers, interested parties, etc had put together. A bit like MPEG. I think the European companies have a more diverse market, so appreciate the value of standards. Especially if
it leads to cheap standardised hardware that
everyone can use.
I think the TDMA and CDMA were developed in the USA after GSM. Possibly prompted by a 'not invented here' attitude. AFAIK CDMA and TDMA are technically superior to GSM, but GSM has the advantage in that more networks use it. Allowing one handset to be used in more places, and cheaper hardware through mass production.
But I could be wrong.
Charging by usage does have its advantages, it regulates the use of a scarce resource
(phone lines), by making you pay for what you use.
Certainly I never have any trouble with busy lines to my ISP or my ISP not having any modems free.
Charging on a time used basis does discourage the "I'll phone up my ISP and stay on-line all day. Even if I'm not using the connection." attitude.
Your description sounds remarkably like this
8 processer StrongARM PCI card described here:-
http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/sa-beowulf/
Personally I think they'd make a great addition
to my RC5 key speed.
Now all we need is Sony to put a modem on it,
and a TCP/IP stack. Then distributed.net to
port an RC5 client on it and we're laughing.
Particularly if they sell it for as much
as a playstation.
I thought the main reason HDTV hs never taken off,
was no demand. The companies producing (or
planning to) HDTV did 'blind' [1] screenings with
viewers to see what they preferred. Regular TV
with better sound was judged to be better than
HDTV with regular sound. HDTV with better sound
was judged just as good as regular TV with better
sound.
[1] No pun intended
>Check your facts jack
In my experience.
PowerBook 1400 - PowerPC 603ev 166MHz - 548Kkeys/s
IBM PC Pentium MMX 200 MHz - 420 KKeys/s
We have one PC in our office here that's
managed 556 KKeys/s Pentium II, not sure
of the clock speed.
PowerPC G3 550MHz (466 overclocked) - 1736K keys/sec [1]
[1] from http://www.macintouch.com/g3zif466.html
Hope this helps
I wonder what sort speed Apache and LinuxPPC would give. Running on the same hardware as MacOs X
Server of course.
Does this mean MkLinux and LinuxPPC are now
competitors to the future of MacOs?
Will Apple kill off MkLinx?