I worked for a summer at my college, which was setting up one of the first broadband cable installations in the world at the time (summer of '95). The IT guys did NOT like AppleTalk for precisely that reason.
AppleTalk is nice for LANs. I use it myself (or more precisely the AppleTalk Filing Protocol, which has run primarily over IP since, I don't know, around '98 or so), even on OS X, because it's still more smoothly integrated into the system than anything else, but Apple (wisely, I think) made a herculean but partially failed effort to get rid of it simply because there was no need for it anymore with TCP/IP taking over everything. What ZeroConf/Rendezvous/OpenTalk is doing is bringing the last important piece of AppleTalk functionality -- the ability to announce services -- available to the TCP/IP world.
Now between BootP/DHCP and OpenTalk, there is no further need for AppleTalk except on legacy networks.
I neglected to mention Sharp... I don't much like their Viewcam Z designs, either the old still-camera style or the newer Rubik's Cube design (though I will say that the newer ones do have a real viewfinder as well as the LCD monitor), but that doesn't say much about the actual quality of their hardware in general. I do believe they, not Panasonic, were the first to offer a consumer-level 3CCD camera a couple of years ago, but I don't know much about it except that it wasn't considered anything to write home about and isn't made anymore.
I agree that having a separate charger is a good idea. It's forcing you to use it that bothers me -- I think it's a bad design choice.
As for the size, what can I say? I just think camcorder designs have hit a point of diminishing returns -- the controls get harder to deal with (look at Sony and their touchscreen obsession), the cameras become awkward to deal with on tripods, and they get lost in your hand too easily. The GS120 with its 3CCD arrangement actually makes up for most of Panasonic's typical design flaws, though; I agree that at the very least it's not easily dismissed. Hopefully it's only the first of many low-cost camcorders with near-pro quality picture.
Please rectify my ignorance -- what good is progressive scan for anything that is likely to be used for TV output? Its benefits are obvious for film conversion but they're a bit lost on me otherwise -- most SDTVs don't even have progressive scan, do they?
Normally I'd agree with you, but there are a handful of high-end camcorders that can answer the question. Low-end... well, truth be told I've heard quality is pretty much the same for all the low-end 1CCD consumer cameras, so it comes down to what you need and the general reputation of the brand. A few semi-informed brand opinions:
Sony: excellent quality but you pay a premium for the name. Probably the only important manufacturer of Digital8 hardware, which might be important if you have a large library of 8mm tapes to be digitized, but they don't make any D8 hardware even close to pro-quality. Sony is also a fan of proprietary formats -- Memory Stick instead of SD/MMC or CompactFlash, MicroMV (which is nothing but a marketing gimmick as far as I'm concerned).
JVC: I use a JVC myself. JVC tends to hide occasional pro features in their camera menus (particularly manual white balance) but the quality of the product depends on the model year. Mine is 2002 and I've never had a complaint; the 2003 models, though, looked and felt like junk. Their 2004 models are too small and seem to have ergonomic issues. JVC does have the only consumer HDTV camcorder available right now.
Canon: They seem to keep their designs pretty consistent from year to year, and the GL and XL series pretty much define the high end for consumer/prosumer camera hardware. Their ZR series is a little on the small side for me, though I'd probably buy one of them if I was in the market for a second camcorder.
Panasonic: The only cheap 3CCD camcorders on the market is one of theirs -- I think the low-end one costs around $800. I can't say much about the quality, though I do find their ergonomics to be awkward -- the cameras are too small, and you have to unplug the battery and put it in a separate charger. To me this is an utterly ridiculous sort of design flaw.
Samsung: Junk for now, though it's gotten better over the years. Tends to be rather gimmicky, though apparently they can play back PAL-format miniDV on an NTSC TV, which would make for a powerful advantage in certain markets.
I think that covers most of the major manufacturers, at least those you'll find at Best Buy or Circuit City. My thinking is that Sony and Canon probably offer the best product available for most purposes, with JVC being a decent choice on the high end but dodgy at best on the Best Buy level of things.
Hmmm... I don't see the DVD camcorders catching on for most people. As for transfer limits... Firewire should make transfers easy. Not sure what your problem is.
Panasonic probably has the only cheap 3CCD camera going, if you're on a budget and color is important to you -- you can get one for $7-800, though you're stuck with the limitations of consumer equipment (particularly the obnoxious ergonomic quirks of Panasonic hardware -- too small, and what-were-they-thinking battery design). You can also snag a Sony TRV-950 for as little as $1500 if you buy it refurbished, or a used Canon GL-1 for about the same amount.
I think the Canon GL-2, with the manual audio controls and the built-in shotgun mike, is the prosumer cam of choice these days though -- I think it's around $3K and it's a very reasonable size for something that loaded. As for the XL-1(S) and XL-2... well, they've got their advantages for pros, but the one time I got to work with an XL-1 I grew to hate the bulk of the thing quite rapidly. For the hardcore pro on an infinite budget, the XL-2 is probably worth the money (especially where being able to swap lenses is a necessity, as in nature documentaries and the like), and the ability to use it off the shoulder instead of having to hold it up is nice, but I would think it's not worth it for nine out of ten video producers. (Hell, I do a cooking show with a two-year-old JVC consumer camcorder... of course JVC does sneak the odd pro feature like manual white balance into even their junkier hardware...)
One thing to consider: HDTV. The JVC GR-HD1 has a reputation for being kind of balky with color, but it's pretty much your only option if you're shooting for a high-def end result.
I think a lot of it relates to the fact that pro equipment just doesn't have a lot of features that consumer equipment has as well. Pros don't need them, so there's no great rush to add them into the product. I've no doubt adding enhanced still capability to the GL-2 was somewhat controversial.
Or at least to make it look that way. If everybody bought their cameras the way pros do, the companies making them would have nothing to sell./says someone who, somewhere, still has a camera that's over 15 years old and works
These days we've even got 3CCD consumer-grade camcorders, still using consumer-grade optics and such... what's interesting is that they migrate certain features downmarket while leaving others for higher-end equipment. My 2002 JVC camcorder lacks A/V IN, but has a large screen and a remote port, which the equivalent model from the 2003 model year lacks. And I've been told JVC's 2003 models were junk -- well, they certainly looked the part.
I don't know. The whole product lifecycle thing has gotten out of control on the consumer level. My personal gripe is with camcorder manufacturers -- they make their product too damn small these days! Some models do have near-professional grade features (manual white balance, A/V in), but look at what the pros are using -- the high-end Canon and Sony equipment generally has a couple of years at least. Pros apparently don't like messing around with their equipment -- the Canon GL-2 has only a few major improvements over the GL-1, such as a memory card and manual audio levels, but they're real improvements, not just bullet point features.
Would Best Buy even sell something like this? Seems to me that this particular system would have very little market outside the.edu channel, and it isn't really necessary in the US (though it'd be an interesting toy for some CS students, and in drastically enhanced form for gamers).
We really do need some mainstream distros willing to say "the hell with this, we've got users on junk hardware out there, let's scale it back a bit". Instead we've got the moving targets of KDE and GNOME, getting bigger and bigger and bigger...
Jared Diamond would disagree with you. Though I see your point about brain drain.
Truthfully, while I'd like to see more impressive specs on a system like that I think it's a great idea. Cheap hardware with unencumbered software is not a bad idea for developing areas, though the focus on South Africa strikes me as a bit odd -- why there?
Whoever modded this a troll doesn't know much about how comm frequencies are allocated. The fact is that according to the article, keyless entry systems are secondary users on their allocated frequencies. Ask a ham what that means.
For an excellent example, hams were in the last couple years authorized to operate on the 60m band. That probably means nothing to most people, but it's a specific band that is used by amateurs in other countries, with its own unique propagation characteristics. However, amateurs, who generally get the run of whatever band they're allowed, are limited to one particular operation mode (upper sideband) on five channels, one of which is shared with the UK making international contact on that band possible. The reason for the limitation: the primary users on that band are military and emergency-related, they use upper sideband on those frequencies, and they need to be able to clear the channel for their own use, so they have to be able to talk to other users. (It's an annoyance to hams, who are used to being able to operate any mode they wish, but c'est la vie.)
What looks like the case here is that the remote systems are designed to operate under Part 15 rules, which govern general unlicensed transmission. They're the same rules under which a community low power AM station can broadcast, and are subject to the same terms. In this case, it was an unfortunate choice for car manufacturers, because the frequency chosen is apparently used for certain FCC-allocated classified purposes. Oh well.
FM broadcasting is more complicated than you'd think, though -- an improperly transmitted FM signal can have theoretically infinite sidebands, where an AM signal would have only two (one of which can be eliminated). It's been proven otherwise, but I think Big Media thought it had an actual point crying interference.
In any case, community radio is already here -- part 15 AM can cover a sizeable chunk of a town (at least here in the northeast) and multiple synchronized transmitters can create a large coverage area with no need for a broadcast license.
I've actually had a friend express a small amount of envy at my large library of car CD mixes. The Boston market at least has a few small-conglom (FNX, the WGBH radio stations) and indy (WXRV) stations left that provide some diversity... one of the few areas where Clear Channel owns only a small swath of the dial, but Infinity is very powerful actually.
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
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· Score: 1
There's no denying one thing: the most interesting stuff being done with amateur RF engineering these days is beind done with systems related to but far more advanced than AX.25 packet radio. You don't need a license to work 802.11.
Actually, learning about packet radio was one of the reasons I got my ticket... I was deeply dismayed to find out that a) packet radio is way, way behind the technical curve, and that b) it's dying out anyway. Kinda sucked the wind out of my sails.
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly you can cover quite a bit of ground on the AM broadcast bands without needing a broadcast license -- there's a Part 15 station running in Brighton, MA called Allston-Brighton Free Radio (www.abfreeradio.org, I believe) that covers not only Brighton (the westernmost fragment of Boston) but parts of the neighboring towns of Brookline, Cambridge and Newton.
You can't do that on FM though (there's about a quarter mile limit), and part 15 broadcasts on AM have some pretty severe antenna restrictions.
I would go so far as to say that whether or not it was originally meant as a B5 knockoff, DS9 had some of the most intense plotting and intricate character relationships of the entire Trek canon. Far from being Picard the Boy Scout or Kirk the Adventurer, Sisko was a deeply conflicted man who did some very, very bad things at times to try to make things come out right. I think if you want to look at what Star Trek always should have been, you have to look at DS9; it was the only show where some of the supporting characters were as important or more important than some of the main characters.
That said, Voyager had one thing going for it: if I was going to take any ship in the Trek canon, it would be the Voyager. Of all the ships on the show, that one is the closest to indestructible...
actually, the iPaq is one of the more open platforms in the PDA world, probably slightly more so than the Palm.
Though I agree with you about lockin -- during my brief career as a computer tech I saw the aftermath of trying to repair a minitower Presario. Almost everything about it was standard except the front panel connectors -- had to sell the customer a whole new case. Dell was even worse -- for a couple of years they were using nonstandard power connectors on their PCs, meaning things got fried if you tried to plug an ATX power connector into a Dell-modded motherboard. Basically to repair Dell systems (from about 1999 to 2002, I think, was the time frame) you have to replace the power supply as well as the motherboard.
Terrasoft is an authorized Apple reseller, and the hooks are there to boot pretty much anything you want on a New World Mac (basically everything since the original iMac). Reason: the 32-bit New World architecture is essentially Apple's implementation of CHRP, the compromise platform that was created by Apple and IBM when Mac cloning still had promise. Apple has no reason to change that -- they know that their hardware offers benefits to third-party OS developers.
And there are Linux-friendly PPC motherboards -- the Pegasos and a couple others marketed mostly to the Amiga enthusiast crowd -- but they're very, very expensive. To the casual LinuxPPC user, a copy of YellowDog and an $800 eMac is still the best entry-level choice.
Point being that he was homosexual and persecuted because of it. Point being that was an important aspect of his life. You can't tell the story of Alan Turing without mentioning his homosexuality.
As for GWB, the guy who wrote Fortunate Son spilled those beans, actually liked Dubya, and still wound up getting hounded to death by the GOP machine for writing the book in the first place. You tell me.
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I worked for a summer at my college, which was setting up one of the first broadband cable installations in the world at the time (summer of '95). The IT guys did NOT like AppleTalk for precisely that reason.
AppleTalk is nice for LANs. I use it myself (or more precisely the AppleTalk Filing Protocol, which has run primarily over IP since, I don't know, around '98 or so), even on OS X, because it's still more smoothly integrated into the system than anything else, but Apple (wisely, I think) made a herculean but partially failed effort to get rid of it simply because there was no need for it anymore with TCP/IP taking over everything. What ZeroConf/Rendezvous/OpenTalk is doing is bringing the last important piece of AppleTalk functionality -- the ability to announce services -- available to the TCP/IP world.
Now between BootP/DHCP and OpenTalk, there is no further need for AppleTalk except on legacy networks.
Granted we'll probably have to wait until 2006 or so for an HD version of iMovie, but how does it work with Final Cut?
I neglected to mention Sharp... I don't much like their Viewcam Z designs, either the old still-camera style or the newer Rubik's Cube design (though I will say that the newer ones do have a real viewfinder as well as the LCD monitor), but that doesn't say much about the actual quality of their hardware in general. I do believe they, not Panasonic, were the first to offer a consumer-level 3CCD camera a couple of years ago, but I don't know much about it except that it wasn't considered anything to write home about and isn't made anymore.
I agree that having a separate charger is a good idea. It's forcing you to use it that bothers me -- I think it's a bad design choice.
As for the size, what can I say? I just think camcorder designs have hit a point of diminishing returns -- the controls get harder to deal with (look at Sony and their touchscreen obsession), the cameras become awkward to deal with on tripods, and they get lost in your hand too easily. The GS120 with its 3CCD arrangement actually makes up for most of Panasonic's typical design flaws, though; I agree that at the very least it's not easily dismissed. Hopefully it's only the first of many low-cost camcorders with near-pro quality picture.
Please rectify my ignorance -- what good is progressive scan for anything that is likely to be used for TV output? Its benefits are obvious for film conversion but they're a bit lost on me otherwise -- most SDTVs don't even have progressive scan, do they?
Normally I'd agree with you, but there are a handful of high-end camcorders that can answer the question. Low-end... well, truth be told I've heard quality is pretty much the same for all the low-end 1CCD consumer cameras, so it comes down to what you need and the general reputation of the brand. A few semi-informed brand opinions:
Sony: excellent quality but you pay a premium for the name. Probably the only important manufacturer of Digital8 hardware, which might be important if you have a large library of 8mm tapes to be digitized, but they don't make any D8 hardware even close to pro-quality. Sony is also a fan of proprietary formats -- Memory Stick instead of SD/MMC or CompactFlash, MicroMV (which is nothing but a marketing gimmick as far as I'm concerned).
JVC: I use a JVC myself. JVC tends to hide occasional pro features in their camera menus (particularly manual white balance) but the quality of the product depends on the model year. Mine is 2002 and I've never had a complaint; the 2003 models, though, looked and felt like junk. Their 2004 models are too small and seem to have ergonomic issues. JVC does have the only consumer HDTV camcorder available right now.
Canon: They seem to keep their designs pretty consistent from year to year, and the GL and XL series pretty much define the high end for consumer/prosumer camera hardware. Their ZR series is a little on the small side for me, though I'd probably buy one of them if I was in the market for a second camcorder.
Panasonic: The only cheap 3CCD camcorders on the market is one of theirs -- I think the low-end one costs around $800. I can't say much about the quality, though I do find their ergonomics to be awkward -- the cameras are too small, and you have to unplug the battery and put it in a separate charger. To me this is an utterly ridiculous sort of design flaw.
Samsung: Junk for now, though it's gotten better over the years. Tends to be rather gimmicky, though apparently they can play back PAL-format miniDV on an NTSC TV, which would make for a powerful advantage in certain markets.
I think that covers most of the major manufacturers, at least those you'll find at Best Buy or Circuit City. My thinking is that Sony and Canon probably offer the best product available for most purposes, with JVC being a decent choice on the high end but dodgy at best on the Best Buy level of things.
Hmmm... I don't see the DVD camcorders catching on for most people. As for transfer limits... Firewire should make transfers easy. Not sure what your problem is.
Panasonic probably has the only cheap 3CCD camera going, if you're on a budget and color is important to you -- you can get one for $7-800, though you're stuck with the limitations of consumer equipment (particularly the obnoxious ergonomic quirks of Panasonic hardware -- too small, and what-were-they-thinking battery design). You can also snag a Sony TRV-950 for as little as $1500 if you buy it refurbished, or a used Canon GL-1 for about the same amount.
I think the Canon GL-2, with the manual audio controls and the built-in shotgun mike, is the prosumer cam of choice these days though -- I think it's around $3K and it's a very reasonable size for something that loaded. As for the XL-1(S) and XL-2... well, they've got their advantages for pros, but the one time I got to work with an XL-1 I grew to hate the bulk of the thing quite rapidly. For the hardcore pro on an infinite budget, the XL-2 is probably worth the money (especially where being able to swap lenses is a necessity, as in nature documentaries and the like), and the ability to use it off the shoulder instead of having to hold it up is nice, but I would think it's not worth it for nine out of ten video producers. (Hell, I do a cooking show with a two-year-old JVC consumer camcorder... of course JVC does sneak the odd pro feature like manual white balance into even their junkier hardware...)
One thing to consider: HDTV. The JVC GR-HD1 has a reputation for being kind of balky with color, but it's pretty much your only option if you're shooting for a high-def end result.
I think a lot of it relates to the fact that pro equipment just doesn't have a lot of features that consumer equipment has as well. Pros don't need them, so there's no great rush to add them into the product. I've no doubt adding enhanced still capability to the GL-2 was somewhat controversial.
Or at least to make it look that way. If everybody bought their cameras the way pros do, the companies making them would have nothing to sell. /says someone who, somewhere, still has a camera that's over 15 years old and works
These days we've even got 3CCD consumer-grade camcorders, still using consumer-grade optics and such... what's interesting is that they migrate certain features downmarket while leaving others for higher-end equipment. My 2002 JVC camcorder lacks A/V IN, but has a large screen and a remote port, which the equivalent model from the 2003 model year lacks. And I've been told JVC's 2003 models were junk -- well, they certainly looked the part.
I don't know. The whole product lifecycle thing has gotten out of control on the consumer level. My personal gripe is with camcorder manufacturers -- they make their product too damn small these days! Some models do have near-professional grade features (manual white balance, A/V in), but look at what the pros are using -- the high-end Canon and Sony equipment generally has a couple of years at least. Pros apparently don't like messing around with their equipment -- the Canon GL-2 has only a few major improvements over the GL-1, such as a memory card and manual audio levels, but they're real improvements, not just bullet point features.
Would Best Buy even sell something like this? Seems to me that this particular system would have very little market outside the .edu channel, and it isn't really necessary in the US (though it'd be an interesting toy for some CS students, and in drastically enhanced form for gamers).
Ah, Open Source software bloat...
We really do need some mainstream distros willing to say "the hell with this, we've got users on junk hardware out there, let's scale it back a bit". Instead we've got the moving targets of KDE and GNOME, getting bigger and bigger and bigger...
Jared Diamond would disagree with you. Though I see your point about brain drain.
Truthfully, while I'd like to see more impressive specs on a system like that I think it's a great idea. Cheap hardware with unencumbered software is not a bad idea for developing areas, though the focus on South Africa strikes me as a bit odd -- why there?
Whoever modded this a troll doesn't know much about how comm frequencies are allocated. The fact is that according to the article, keyless entry systems are secondary users on their allocated frequencies. Ask a ham what that means.
For an excellent example, hams were in the last couple years authorized to operate on the 60m band. That probably means nothing to most people, but it's a specific band that is used by amateurs in other countries, with its own unique propagation characteristics. However, amateurs, who generally get the run of whatever band they're allowed, are limited to one particular operation mode (upper sideband) on five channels, one of which is shared with the UK making international contact on that band possible. The reason for the limitation: the primary users on that band are military and emergency-related, they use upper sideband on those frequencies, and they need to be able to clear the channel for their own use, so they have to be able to talk to other users. (It's an annoyance to hams, who are used to being able to operate any mode they wish, but c'est la vie.)
What looks like the case here is that the remote systems are designed to operate under Part 15 rules, which govern general unlicensed transmission. They're the same rules under which a community low power AM station can broadcast, and are subject to the same terms. In this case, it was an unfortunate choice for car manufacturers, because the frequency chosen is apparently used for certain FCC-allocated classified purposes. Oh well.
FM broadcasting is more complicated than you'd think, though -- an improperly transmitted FM signal can have theoretically infinite sidebands, where an AM signal would have only two (one of which can be eliminated). It's been proven otherwise, but I think Big Media thought it had an actual point crying interference.
In any case, community radio is already here -- part 15 AM can cover a sizeable chunk of a town (at least here in the northeast) and multiple synchronized transmitters can create a large coverage area with no need for a broadcast license.
I've actually had a friend express a small amount of envy at my large library of car CD mixes. The Boston market at least has a few small-conglom (FNX, the WGBH radio stations) and indy (WXRV) stations left that provide some diversity... one of the few areas where Clear Channel owns only a small swath of the dial, but Infinity is very powerful actually.
There's no denying one thing: the most interesting stuff being done with amateur RF engineering these days is beind done with systems related to but far more advanced than AX.25 packet radio. You don't need a license to work 802.11.
Actually, learning about packet radio was one of the reasons I got my ticket... I was deeply dismayed to find out that a) packet radio is way, way behind the technical curve, and that b) it's dying out anyway. Kinda sucked the wind out of my sails.
Interestingly you can cover quite a bit of ground on the AM broadcast bands without needing a broadcast license -- there's a Part 15 station running in Brighton, MA called Allston-Brighton Free Radio (www.abfreeradio.org, I believe) that covers not only Brighton (the westernmost fragment of Boston) but parts of the neighboring towns of Brookline, Cambridge and Newton.
You can't do that on FM though (there's about a quarter mile limit), and part 15 broadcasts on AM have some pretty severe antenna restrictions.
heh, that too...
All good points on that page, but hey. The Intrepid class would still be a pretty tough ship anyway...
The troll here is a complete lack of a grasp of linguistics...
I would go so far as to say that whether or not it was originally meant as a B5 knockoff, DS9 had some of the most intense plotting and intricate character relationships of the entire Trek canon. Far from being Picard the Boy Scout or Kirk the Adventurer, Sisko was a deeply conflicted man who did some very, very bad things at times to try to make things come out right. I think if you want to look at what Star Trek always should have been, you have to look at DS9; it was the only show where some of the supporting characters were as important or more important than some of the main characters.
That said, Voyager had one thing going for it: if I was going to take any ship in the Trek canon, it would be the Voyager. Of all the ships on the show, that one is the closest to indestructible...
actually, the iPaq is one of the more open platforms in the PDA world, probably slightly more so than the Palm.
Though I agree with you about lockin -- during my brief career as a computer tech I saw the aftermath of trying to repair a minitower Presario. Almost everything about it was standard except the front panel connectors -- had to sell the customer a whole new case. Dell was even worse -- for a couple of years they were using nonstandard power connectors on their PCs, meaning things got fried if you tried to plug an ATX power connector into a Dell-modded motherboard. Basically to repair Dell systems (from about 1999 to 2002, I think, was the time frame) you have to replace the power supply as well as the motherboard.
Terrasoft is an authorized Apple reseller, and the hooks are there to boot pretty much anything you want on a New World Mac (basically everything since the original iMac). Reason: the 32-bit New World architecture is essentially Apple's implementation of CHRP, the compromise platform that was created by Apple and IBM when Mac cloning still had promise. Apple has no reason to change that -- they know that their hardware offers benefits to third-party OS developers.
And there are Linux-friendly PPC motherboards -- the Pegasos and a couple others marketed mostly to the Amiga enthusiast crowd -- but they're very, very expensive. To the casual LinuxPPC user, a copy of YellowDog and an $800 eMac is still the best entry-level choice.
Point being that he was homosexual and persecuted because of it. Point being that was an important aspect of his life. You can't tell the story of Alan Turing without mentioning his homosexuality.
As for GWB, the guy who wrote Fortunate Son spilled those beans, actually liked Dubya, and still wound up getting hounded to death by the GOP machine for writing the book in the first place. You tell me.