My wife was sitting next to me and reading over my shoulder at the time:-)
It all started the other way around. I asked her if she'd like to see Australia and she said "yes". Then I had to figure out how to pay for it:-)
*That's* where the dish came in:-)
Re:Satellite uplinks - aren't they a serious affai
on
Mobile Internet Down Under
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You are basically correct. My dish is technically an uplink station, but I have no control over power. I can only control aim and polarisation.
Aim is achieved by using a set-top box in install mode, then I maximize the signal. Polarisation is read off a map and adjusted accordingly.
When I get online, I send an email to the BOC to get a cross-poll check done so I don't splat over other people's signal, but I've set it up seven times so far and have yet to get asked to change the polarisation.
The accuracy is waaay less than 1 degree. I could calculate it, but using a 16mm bolt, the difference between connection and not is 1/8 of a bolt-turn.
Optus requires that everytime I setup the dish a polarisation check is completed. They can only do that from the BOC. I basically setup the dish, use the polarisation map they provide, get online and send them an email.
So-far I've setup the dish eight times in vastly different locations and not had any polarisation errors.
The only thing they told me is not to put my head between the transmitter and the dish:-)
They tell me that they'll send me an installer certificate, because I seem to know what I'm doing , but I'm not holding my breath:-)
As the guy who is doing the travelling, I figured, what better time to do some karma-whoring than when the story is about you:-)
While it took us a long time to get it all working, the payoff in life-style change was well worth the effort. I just fielded a phone call from a guy in Sydney who couldn't believe that I really existed, that I was in Australia and that he could phone me.
Next I'll be famous:-)
I've gotta admit that my web-site is pretty bare at the moment, you can slashdot it if you like, because it's safely on the wired end of the net - but there is only a placeholder because I keep being asked to explain what it is I did.
You'll notice from the photos that the dish sits on a pretty big frame. That takes about an hour to bolt together - if I do it on my own, all in all 18 bolts, then I get some beefy guys to help me lift the dish on, then plug in all the bits, power it up and on average 10 minutes later I connect - that is if Optus hasn't changed satellites or frequencies without sending me an update first:-(
Over the solar-car challenge during October 18-28, we'll travel down the middle of Australia and the Sungroper team will help me setup the dish every night.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me, or post here, onno at itmaze dot com dot au. --
Issuing certificates does not solve the SPAM problem at all. There is no method to detect if the person who is applying for a certificate is an evil spammer or not.
Most evil spammers actually run a business, so they'd qualify to get a certificate for their business.
Getting central signing, or issuing cheap certificates does not solve the spam problem in any way.
Sure the OSS community releases fixes faster, but how quickly do they penetrate the userbase? I think Windows Update is a far superior platform for distributing fixes than currently exists in the Linux world, if only because not every Linux distribution offers such a powerful tool.
While I agree that not every Linux distribution offers "such a powerful tool", I must also point out that with the current Linux userbase, most are able to run their respective tools. (I prefer apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade myself)
Having used Windows Update, I would shudder to use it and the word "superior" in one sentence, but I leave room for other experiences.
My experience has to date been as others suggested; IE required with multiple reboots and multiple updates, not to mention the sheer volume of suggested updates - none of which I asked for - given that they all appeared to add extra software, not fix existing code.
Now I realise that you can also be the unwitting recipient of functionality and licence changing updates through Windows Update, but as a technology I think it's way better than what is available in the OSS world right now.
I can only surmise that you have not experienced the joys of the update that I do regularly on my workstation. Some days I'll put off doing an update because it slows down something else I'm doing, but overall, my updates just happen in the background - eg. I fire off my favorite two commands and every now and then check the terminal window to see what's going.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Debian is the end-all-and-be-all, but for me it works where Windows plainly does not (anymore). --
Article CD-R Rotting Tuesday 19 August, 2003 CD-R's unreadable within two years Sampling delivers disturbing Results
Valuable information on a cd-r are in practice not durable. From our real-world test to be published in the September issue of PC-Active, it turns out that the data on a cd-r can become unreadable within two years. The chance is good that the use of certain brands of cd-r's important personal information gets lost.
As a reader of PC-Active you likely know, we tested a large number of cd-r's in 2001, and published the results. Our tests already showed that new cd-r's sometimes did not meet standard quality requirements. For two years we stored the thirty different brands we tested thoroughly that year in the original packaging in a closed cupboard. For the Article 'CD-R Rotting' we again subjected these disks to a test with a professional cd-analyzer which at bit-level determines the state of the cd-r.
[IMAGE (November 2001 - Now)]
On this image you see the exact same cd-r. On the left are the test results from 2001, and on the right the same cd-r in 2003. The colors indicate the seriousness of errors in order: white, green, yellow and red. Respectively, "good readability" (white) and "unreadable" (red).
The test shows that a number of cd-r's were completely unreadable and other cd-r's had partial readability of the information. Data that was put onto the cd-r twenty months ago had become unreadable. This was on cd-r's from known and lesser manufacturers.
Generally assumed is that cd-r's are readable for ten years at least. Some manufacturers even claim a storage length of a century. Our sampling shows that there is a lot of rubbish on the market. We have found cd-r's that should never had made it to market. It is possible that we are talking about dumped batches. It is unacceptable that cd-r's within barely two years have become completely unusable.
In the September issue of PC-Active, that will be in the shop on august 22, the shocking results are exhaustively described. Next to the possible causes associated with the loss if data over time, we also supply valuable tips to secure a writable cd for the future. Additionally, on the free cd-rom a program exists to determine for yourself the state of a cd-r.
PC-Active September 2003 (from August 22 in the shop_
That would be because at low speed, Aerodynamics is mostly a waste of time. If you hit 100km/h, then it begins to matter.
This is why when Porche made it's self-erecting spoiler, it only popped up at 140km/h - so people started speeding - so Porche did a firmware upgrade to make it come up at 100km/h.
If the nomenclature for software that runs on Windows is "Windows Software", then software that runs on Linux would have to be "Linux Software"
Is this a really grey line? Sure, that's the whole point. Linux runs on many different (hardware) platforms, software that runs on top of Linux on that platform is "Linux Software"
Your point about X11, Gnome and KDE as well as other stuff running on OSX just serves to highlight my point. No-one said that the platforms that Linux runs on are limited to Hardware, thus you can run Linux on a Windows machine as well as a MacOS X machine, you're still running (some part of) Linux to make it actually work.
While calculating PageRank seems like a nice idea, I'm much more interested in having a google search available over my harddisk. I recall that AltaVista in the mid-90's had a programme that created an index over your whole disk - it dealt with many filetypes including.doc,.pdf,.mbox and basically gave you an AltaVista search over all your harddisk content.
We'll do it first in US dollars, because the number is one that has been quoted (I'm an Aussie):
A song costs $US 0.99 A CD contains ~ 17 tracks, or $US 16.83
The current exchange rate is ~ 0.60
Thus a CD worth of songs costs: $AUD 28.05
Now in addition to this, you're also paying for bandwidth, because unlike purchasing the CD in the shop where the distribution network is paid for by the supplier, the electronic distribution is now paid for by you.
Lets assume for a moment you have a basic ADSL account, lets say 256K download, with a 2Gb cap. Cost is $AUD 60.00
A song is roughly 3.5Mb (based on looking at the songs on my HD, guestimating an average size), thus with your 2Gb cap you can download about 580 songs. Thus each song also costs $AUD 0.10 in download charge.
A 256K ADSL account has a throughput of about 25Kb per second. Thus each song will take just over 2 minutes to download.
You save on time going to the shop and you save on your bus fare getting there.
To download your CD would cost you around $AUD 29.75.
You end up with a CD worth of music, which takes up around 60Mb of space on your hard disk. A 20Gb HDD costs around $AUD 100, so you can store around 60 CD's worth, or around 5850 songs. Cost per song: $AUD 0.02.
So your CD has now cost:
$AUD 28.05 charge to purchase
$AUD 1.70 charge to download
$AUD 0.34 charge to store
Total: $AUD 30.09
For this $AUD 30.09 you get an electronic copy of a CD, with no media to use in your car (additional cost $AUD 0.50 for a Blank CD), no case to store it in (additional cost $AUD 1.00 for a case), no cover booklet (additional cost of $AUD 0.20), all for the convenience of electronic shopping.
To top it off, if you haven't burned a CD of your tracks, if your hard disk crashes, or your files get accidentally deleted, you have nothing and you can pay for your music again.
Contrast this with buying a CD in a store, which can cost you anywhere between $AUD 19.95 and $AUD 29.95, plus $AUD 1.50 for the bus.
And finally, for the audio purists among us. We're not talking about CD quality music here, we're talking compressed MPEG. A CD quality download is 650Mb, thus you can only download 3 CD's for your $AUD 60. Making the download cost $AUD 20 per CD. It would also take nearly 7.5 hours per CD on your 256K ADSL account.
As an aside, the electronic CD shop consists of an Internet connection, a server farm and software. The current method of distributing CDs involves printing CDs, booklets, boxes, posters. Shipping them across the globe, putting them into warehouses, shipping product to shops, stocking shelves and returning faulty CDs.
Are the record companies excited - I would be if I could make money for nothing!
So, perhaps it will go well. But at these prices I won't be a shopper.
Disclaimer:
All care has been taken to make these calculations accurate. All prices are Australian dollars - except the inital quote for $0.99 per track. One Australian dollar is calculated to buy 0.60 US dollars. 1Gb is 1024Mb, 1Mb is 1024Kb. A 256K download link is 25Kb/s effective throughput. A song size is guestimated at 3.5Mb. A CD is taken to have around 17 songs.
Just got off the phone with Jeremy, being that I live in Perth. The trust account for the Defence Fund is being set-up in the next few days.
Details and endoresment from "two prominent Australian Internet people" will accompany its announcement.
Seeing that most of slashdot is still asleep (I'm guessing), Jeremy is bracing himself for the/.-effect.
Perhaps the scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Centre have finally run into the limitations of magnetic storage.
In 1997 when I visited and spoke with a number of their people, we discussed how as a storage medium, disk drives use a relativly unprepared surface with a sophisticated head, unlike memory which uses a sophisticated surface preparation to store data. In drives the money is spent on the head.
As I recall it, the trend was then toward preparing the disk surface more and more in order to give the head a fighting chance to distinguish between bits.
The limit of size was near (at the time they were finilising their coin sized drive) to the point where information was being stored close to molecular size.
Perhaps they have now reached that limit and have decided that funds are better spent on other storage research.
In my classes I take a computer to bits, then I talk about floppy disks, and bend one (the 3.5" variety), since they don't bend the plastic breaks and presto, there's a floppy thing inside.
I also have a hard disk with no lid, so you can see that the disk is hard (and the floppy and the harddisk look alike in shape too).
If I'm feeling particularly brazen, I take a box of bits and put it all together in class and turn it on.
In our MultiMedia summer schools, we would do a show and tell of an application, then let the kids loose.
Things we did:
Infini-D (rendering, modelling)
PhotoShop
Sound Editing
Adobe Premiere
The final part of the summer school was a finished multi-media project. The class got split into teams, then each team did a plan, set about making the bits, then we would come along and help them glue it all together.
We used SuperCard as the authoring environment at the time, but you could use a web solution and put their work online afterwards.
So, here I was thinking - yay a review. Ah well. I'll supply one then:
I just happened to walk past a copy of Myst III on the shelf, only found out it had been released the week before, never even wondered how much it was going to cost (AUS$84.95), figured that they were lying when they didn't mention NT on the box.
I'm running Myst III on NT4. It's not a supported operating system, my mouse is broken, but using the numeric keypad I have been having a ball.
So what is it like then?
My game came in a big box, with a manual, installation guide, though the box was too big for the CD case, but you get that.
I inserted the CD, fired up the installer, and had no problems.
The game sports full 360 degree views, and I must say that my 17" monitor is too small, I get queasy if I spin around too fast, but the sound is directional, high quality and worth pumping up the volume for.
The manual talks about modes (I hate modal software:-), but it doesn't get in the way too much. The idea is that there is a navigation mode and a click/action mode, but using the numeric keypad, I seem to swap between the two fairly simply.
Game save shows you a screen shot of where you were when you saved, and I suppose my only comment would be that renaming a saved game would be nice. It wasn't obvious that you could change the whole name until I accidentally deleted too much text - the save stuff uses Myst characters, rather than a standard save dialog.
The game itself is for me an excellent example of the development stages of technology, Myst, Riven and Myst III show a definite progression of excellence in development.
As one of the many subscribers to the debian-sparc list I can report that the list is very active, the developers solve a great many problems within hours and to top it off, the Debian Mom of the day, Ben Collins is an active participant.
Linux dead on sparc, not as far as I can tell...
Slashdot Mirror
This made us laugh out loud.
:-)
:-)
:-)
My wife was sitting next to me and reading over my shoulder at the time
It all started the other way around. I asked her if she'd like to see Australia and she said "yes". Then I had to figure out how to pay for it
*That's* where the dish came in
You are basically correct. My dish is technically an uplink station, but I have no control over power. I can only control aim and polarisation.
Aim is achieved by using a set-top box in install mode, then I maximize the signal. Polarisation is read off a map and adjusted accordingly.
When I get online, I send an email to the BOC to get a cross-poll check done so I don't splat over other people's signal, but I've set it up seven times so far and have yet to get asked to change the polarisation.
The accuracy is waaay less than 1 degree. I could calculate it, but using a 16mm bolt, the difference between connection and not is 1/8 of a bolt-turn.
Hiya,
:-(
Can you please send an email to the guy who is travelling (*me*), because I'd like to compare notes and I still need to get VoIP working
Optus requires that everytime I setup the dish a polarisation check is completed. They can only do that from the BOC. I basically setup the dish, use the polarisation map they provide, get online and send them an email.
:-)
:-)
So-far I've setup the dish eight times in vastly different locations and not had any polarisation errors.
The only thing they told me is not to put my head between the transmitter and the dish
They tell me that they'll send me an installer certificate, because I seem to know what I'm doing , but I'm not holding my breath
As the guy who is doing the travelling, I figured, what better time to do some karma-whoring than when the story is about you:-)
:-)
:-(
While it took us a long time to get it all working, the payoff in life-style change was well worth the effort. I just fielded a phone call from a guy in Sydney who couldn't believe that I really existed, that I was in Australia and that he could phone me.
Next I'll be famous
I've gotta admit that my web-site is pretty bare at the moment, you can slashdot it if you like, because it's safely on the wired end of the net - but there is only a placeholder because I keep being asked to explain what it is I did.
You'll notice from the photos that the dish sits on a pretty big frame. That takes about an hour to bolt together - if I do it on my own, all in all 18 bolts, then I get some beefy guys to help me lift the dish on, then plug in all the bits, power it up and on average 10 minutes later I connect - that is if Optus hasn't changed satellites or frequencies without sending me an update first
Over the solar-car challenge during October 18-28, we'll travel down the middle of Australia and the Sungroper team will help me setup the dish every night.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me, or post here, onno at itmaze dot com dot au.
--
This is absolute rubbish.
Issuing certificates does not solve the SPAM problem at all. There is no method to detect if the person who is applying for a certificate is an evil spammer or not.
Most evil spammers actually run a business, so they'd qualify to get a certificate for their business.
Getting central signing, or issuing cheap certificates does not solve the spam problem in any way.
While I agree that not every Linux distribution offers "such a powerful tool", I must also point out that with the current Linux userbase, most are able to run their respective tools. (I prefer apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade myself)
Having used Windows Update, I would shudder to use it and the word "superior" in one sentence, but I leave room for other experiences.
My experience has to date been as others suggested; IE required with multiple reboots and multiple updates, not to mention the sheer volume of suggested updates - none of which I asked for - given that they all appeared to add extra software, not fix existing code.
I can only surmise that you have not experienced the joys of the update that I do regularly on my workstation. Some days I'll put off doing an update because it slows down something else I'm doing, but overall, my updates just happen in the background - eg. I fire off my favorite two commands and every now and then check the terminal window to see what's going.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Debian is the end-all-and-be-all, but for me it works where Windows plainly does not (anymore).
--
Article CD-R Rotting
Tuesday 19 August, 2003
CD-R's unreadable within two years
Sampling delivers disturbing Results
Valuable information on a cd-r are in practice not durable. From our real-world test to be published in the September issue of PC-Active, it turns out that the data on a cd-r can become unreadable within two years. The chance is good that the use of certain brands of cd-r's important personal information gets lost.
As a reader of PC-Active you likely know, we tested a large number of cd-r's in 2001, and published the results. Our tests already showed that new cd-r's sometimes did not meet standard quality requirements. For two years we stored the thirty different brands we tested thoroughly that year in the original packaging in a closed cupboard. For the Article 'CD-R Rotting' we again subjected these disks to a test with a professional cd-analyzer which at bit-level determines the state of the cd-r.
[IMAGE (November 2001 - Now)]
On this image you see the exact same cd-r. On the left are the test results from 2001, and on the right the same cd-r in 2003. The colors indicate the seriousness of errors in order: white, green, yellow and red. Respectively, "good readability" (white) and "unreadable" (red).
The test shows that a number of cd-r's were completely unreadable and other cd-r's had partial readability of the information. Data that was put onto the cd-r twenty months ago had become unreadable. This was on cd-r's from known and lesser manufacturers.
Generally assumed is that cd-r's are readable for ten years at least. Some manufacturers even claim a storage length of a century. Our sampling shows that there is a lot of rubbish on the market. We have found cd-r's that should never had made it to market. It is possible that we are talking about dumped batches. It is unacceptable that cd-r's within barely two years have become completely unusable.
In the September issue of PC-Active, that will be in the shop on august 22, the shocking results are exhaustively described. Next to the possible causes associated with the loss if data over time, we also supply valuable tips to secure a writable cd for the future. Additionally, on the free cd-rom a program exists to determine for yourself the state of a cd-r.
PC-Active September 2003
(from August 22 in the shop_
EU 6.99 (including free cd-rom)
Remarks/Questions? webmaster@pc-active.nl
That would be because at low speed, Aerodynamics is mostly a waste of time. If you hit 100km/h, then it begins to matter.
This is why when Porche made it's self-erecting spoiler, it only popped up at 140km/h - so people started speeding - so Porche did a firmware upgrade to make it come up at 100km/h.
You have got to be kidding...
If the nomenclature for software that runs on Windows is "Windows Software", then software that runs on Linux would have to be "Linux Software"
Is this a really grey line? Sure, that's the whole point. Linux runs on many different (hardware) platforms, software that runs on top of Linux on that platform is "Linux Software"
Your point about X11, Gnome and KDE as well as other stuff running on OSX just serves to highlight my point. No-one said that the platforms that Linux runs on are limited to Hardware, thus you can run Linux on a Windows machine as well as a MacOS X machine, you're still running (some part of) Linux to make it actually work.
I'm not sure why this is a big surprise... I'm more interested to know when Linux will overtake Windows on the desktop.
Anyone know of anything like that?
Ok, lets just do the maths on that.
We'll do it first in US dollars, because the number is one that has been quoted (I'm an Aussie):
A song costs $US 0.99 A CD contains ~ 17 tracks, or $US 16.83
The current exchange rate is ~ 0.60
Thus a CD worth of songs costs: $AUD 28.05
Now in addition to this, you're also paying for bandwidth, because unlike purchasing the CD in the shop where the distribution network is paid for by the supplier, the electronic distribution is now paid for by you.
Lets assume for a moment you have a basic ADSL account, lets say 256K download, with a 2Gb cap. Cost is $AUD 60.00
A song is roughly 3.5Mb (based on looking at the songs on my HD, guestimating an average size), thus with your 2Gb cap you can download about 580 songs. Thus each song also costs $AUD 0.10 in download charge.
A 256K ADSL account has a throughput of about 25Kb per second. Thus each song will take just over 2 minutes to download.
You save on time going to the shop and you save on your bus fare getting there.
To download your CD would cost you around $AUD 29.75.
You end up with a CD worth of music, which takes up around 60Mb of space on your hard disk. A 20Gb HDD costs around $AUD 100, so you can store around 60 CD's worth, or around 5850 songs. Cost per song: $AUD 0.02.
So your CD has now cost:
$AUD 28.05 charge to purchase
$AUD 1.70 charge to download
$AUD 0.34 charge to store
Total: $AUD 30.09
For this $AUD 30.09 you get an electronic copy of a CD, with no media to use in your car (additional cost $AUD 0.50 for a Blank CD), no case to store it in (additional cost $AUD 1.00 for a case), no cover booklet (additional cost of $AUD 0.20), all for the convenience of electronic shopping.
To top it off, if you haven't burned a CD of your tracks, if your hard disk crashes, or your files get accidentally deleted, you have nothing and you can pay for your music again.
Contrast this with buying a CD in a store, which can cost you anywhere between $AUD 19.95 and $AUD 29.95, plus $AUD 1.50 for the bus.
And finally, for the audio purists among us. We're not talking about CD quality music here, we're talking compressed MPEG. A CD quality download is 650Mb, thus you can only download 3 CD's for your $AUD 60. Making the download cost $AUD 20 per CD. It would also take nearly 7.5 hours per CD on your 256K ADSL account.
As an aside, the electronic CD shop consists of an Internet connection, a server farm and software. The current method of distributing CDs involves printing CDs, booklets, boxes, posters. Shipping them across the globe, putting them into warehouses, shipping product to shops, stocking shelves and returning faulty CDs.
Are the record companies excited - I would be if I could make money for nothing!
So, perhaps it will go well. But at these prices I won't be a shopper.
Disclaimer:
All care has been taken to make these calculations accurate. All prices are Australian dollars - except the inital quote for $0.99 per track. One Australian dollar is calculated to buy 0.60 US dollars. 1Gb is 1024Mb, 1Mb is 1024Kb. A 256K download link is 25Kb/s effective throughput. A song size is guestimated at 3.5Mb. A CD is taken to have around 17 songs.
Seeing that most of slashdot is still asleep (I'm guessing), Jeremy is bracing himself for the /.-effect.
In 1997 when I visited and spoke with a number of their people, we discussed how as a storage medium, disk drives use a relativly unprepared surface with a sophisticated head, unlike memory which uses a sophisticated surface preparation to store data. In drives the money is spent on the head.
As I recall it, the trend was then toward preparing the disk surface more and more in order to give the head a fighting chance to distinguish between bits.
The limit of size was near (at the time they were finilising their coin sized drive) to the point where information was being stored close to molecular size.
Perhaps they have now reached that limit and have decided that funds are better spent on other storage research.
I also have a hard disk with no lid, so you can see that the disk is hard (and the floppy and the harddisk look alike in shape too).
If I'm feeling particularly brazen, I take a box of bits and put it all together in class and turn it on.
In our MultiMedia summer schools, we would do a show and tell of an application, then let the kids loose.
Things we did:
Infini-D (rendering, modelling)
PhotoShop
Sound Editing
Adobe Premiere
The final part of the summer school was a finished multi-media project. The class got split into teams, then each team did a plan, set about making the bits, then we would come along and help them glue it all together.
We used SuperCard as the authoring environment at the time, but you could use a web solution and put their work online afterwards.
So, here I was thinking - yay a review. Ah well. I'll supply one then:
:-), but it doesn't get in the way too much. The idea is that there is a navigation mode and a click/action mode, but using the numeric keypad, I seem to swap between the two fairly simply.
I just happened to walk past a copy of Myst III on the shelf, only found out it had been released the week before, never even wondered how much it was going to cost (AUS$84.95), figured that they were lying when they didn't mention NT on the box.
I'm running Myst III on NT4. It's not a supported operating system, my mouse is broken, but using the numeric keypad I have been having a ball.
So what is it like then?
My game came in a big box, with a manual, installation guide, though the box was too big for the CD case, but you get that.
I inserted the CD, fired up the installer, and had no problems.
The game sports full 360 degree views, and I must say that my 17" monitor is too small, I get queasy if I spin around too fast, but the sound is directional, high quality and worth pumping up the volume for.
The manual talks about modes (I hate modal software
Game save shows you a screen shot of where you were when you saved, and I suppose my only comment would be that renaming a saved game would be nice. It wasn't obvious that you could change the whole name until I accidentally deleted too much text - the save stuff uses Myst characters, rather than a standard save dialog.
The game itself is for me an excellent example of the development stages of technology, Myst, Riven and Myst III show a definite progression of excellence in development.
For my money, well worth it.
As one of the many subscribers to the debian-sparc list I can report that the list is very active, the developers solve a great many problems within hours and to top it off, the Debian Mom of the day, Ben Collins is an active participant. Linux dead on sparc, not as far as I can tell...