I've been wondering for some time, is it just the number of business thugs in the world who profit off others' work that has increased? Percentage of politicians bought by lobbyists? Unethical lawyers? Judges with no spine? There has to be a reasonable explanation for the increasingly overzealous copyright lobby beyond "the internet" and "0 cent copies of digital data".
Give XNA a try. It allows you to create games for the Xbox or a Windows PC, and the developer license is only $100 a year. Since you have some C# experience, you should be able to get comfortable with it fairly quickly.
Talking on your phone requires somewhere on the order of 10kbps. Internet browsing or watching garbage quality youtube videos requires 500kbps to 1Mbps. That factor of 100 difference in data rate translates to 20dB difference in SNR (all other things being equal), so you should almost always be able to talk. You're probably right that poor data service is a coverage issue rather than a spectrum congestion issue in many cases, though, and that's ATT's fault for not adding more towers.
I honestly can't believe that U of T and Western would be bullied into to such an outrageous proposition, even if they were being paid money in an attempt by Access Copyright to gain a foothold so that other universities will fall in line. Although this upstanding company can surely be trusted with the contents of all faculty and student e-mail correspondences, including those containing original research ideas and algorithms that aren't intended to be disclosed to anyone else, it just doesn't sound like a good idea.
Vic has been part of some rather amusing drama as of late. Apparently, the "family values" man was divorced after knocking up his parliamentary assistant, as disclosed on a Twitter account with handle 'Vikileaks' who had access to the divorce proceedings. A local Ottawa newspaper then sent a twitter message with a honeypot link to Vikileaks in an attempt try to ascertain the IP address behind this account, and it led back to a Canadian parliament IP address. The Conservatives are now accusing the NDP of a smear campaign. I notice that Wikipedia has been sanitized since last night to remove any mention of Vikileaks.
Considering TFA also cites error rate as a problem, that sounds like a bad solution from a statistical standpoint. If you have N identical devices in a chain, each operating independently with the same error rate Pe, your overall probability of error is 1 - (1 - Pe)^N. This function increases approximately linearly as a function of N when Pe is small (the error rate for the chain is about N*Pe) .
Best video output possible? That sounds an awful lot like marketing department FUD unless the source resolution of the video signal is actually being increased. I'm sure it might be interesting for a few enthusiasts, but it seems awfully hard to justify the $100 price tag just for a format shift.
When you take this system to its logical extreme, i.e., several thousand cameras in a city instead of just a few tens of them to catch people making traffic violations at intersections, it becomes a system to location track everyone anywhere they go. Aside from the prohibitive expense to maintain such a system, you don't have a problem with that?
No, we didn't win that battle. While we were celebrating the victory against metered billing, the CRTC was busy mandating that bulk leasing of existing lines (from Rogers and Bell to smaller competitors such as Teksavvy) would see a price increase. Rogers and Bell managed managed to extort us further by aiming absurdly high.
We're talking about a type of traffic that isn't usually throttled, doesn't require sustained performance for more than 10 seconds, and can be artificially inflated by ISPs to deceive their customers.
To Lemay Yates, who I strongly suspect is a shill that doesn't mind quoting the most favourable statistics to give an overall misleading impression (if not outright manufacturing them with flawed experiments), I ask how Rogers specifically fares in terms of:
-Average cost per monthly quota ($ per GB)?
-Average cost per upload speed ($ per Mbps)?
-Variation in ping and u/l, d/l speed during peak hours?
-How often multi-player video games are throttled?
-Performance beyond the local servers but still within Canada?
There was an interesting article on the academic publishing industry recently. When you get all the material refereed for free (actually, on the dime of the colleges and research institutes who pay the reviewer's salary), there's just no reason why the charges should be soaring up past $20 per article like they have in the last 10 years.
The greed doesn't stop there either. Not long ago I was a volunteer at a fairly prominent IEEE conference. The cost of attendance per person is in the $600-$1000 range. Despite contributing 12+ hours of work, one of the co-chairs had to fight with the organizers just to get them to foot the bill for our lunches.
So SDR is going to drive prices down? Not if we're to judge anything from the price of the development kits and software. It sounds like the end-all in theory, but realize that these devices generally work from (a lower) IF frequency down to baseband rather than being completely digital from RF all the way down. You still need an analog front-end in the receiver, and you get a bulkier, more power hungry, more expensive piece of hardware. The need for future-proof, reprogrammable radios is questionable when the hardware is obsolete in a matter of a few years.
Harangue? Lol, get a grip. You didn't answer anything. I was being polite, but I could tell from the first post that you're a person who blurts out every loosely grasped buzzword they've heard in order to come across as knowledgeable.
That has nothing to do with your original claim regarding RS codes and turbo codes, not does it address the main problem with your implication that bursts of errors are easily correctable. They aren't when the burst length is on the same order as the tolerable amount of latency, and all the processing power in the world does nothing to change that.
So Reed-Solomon is a random error correcting code and turbo codes are burst error correcting codes? That's a very misleading claim. In the past RS was often used to be used as the outer of two concatenated codes for its burst error correction capability.
Cranking up the redundancy or using a huge interleaver may be fine when a couple seconds of latency isn't a big problem (deep space communications, compact discs, etc.) but there's simply no good way to correct long bursts or errors in latency constrained applications such as this would be.
Just one small difference between theory and practice - UBB as envisioned by the Canadian telcos was never intended to be efficient, it was intended to make them more money without any further investment in the infrastructure. Do you really think they're going to concede anything on the low end of the bandwidth usage spectrum, for example by offering old-granny-1GB-per-month a $10 plan? Not a chance in hell. It's a means to punish people for actually using their connections for all those great things they're advertised for (gaming, video and music streaming, large downloads), foisted onto the consumer under the guise of 'fairness'.
Sure, score a small point for not letting Bell and Rogers increase the abuse, but our wired broadband status quo is still terrible. High prices, low monthly caps (60GB typical) with massive overage fees, absurd asymmetry between D/L and U/L rates (10 Mbps down / 0.5 Mbps up typical), unmitigated throttling any time the provider feels like it (apparently 65-85% of the time), 'unintentional' throttling of gaming, etc. Aside from the low caps, you can't even get around any of this by going with one of the smaller ISPs since AFAIK the leased lines are subject to the same 'traffic management' policies.
The service is pretty shitty also - video buffering on a 25Mbps D/L connection, ping to the west coast randomly spiking up to 400ms, problems that 5 calls to tech support over the period of a month and one modem replacement failed to resolve. The tech support guys and technicians all but admit that it's a policy issue rather than anything they can fix.
You've just made a subtle change from "content owner" to "content creator" having the right to make money. That's possibly not even the main issue though - it's about how long they're entitled to legal protection in making said money and when that eventually becomes a burden on society, defeating the intended purpose of copyright. Patent holders for serious inventions, as well as those who gave us technological advances without patenting (before it became such a craze), could only dream of being paid for their contributions for so long. Can you really claim that art deserves such disproportionately superior treatment? Even though you can't pin them down to something as simple as number of copied sold, many tech and math advances are very far reaching in terms of how they influence future work.
In the past I've heard people say it's a good idea when starting a math package, but I think that's probably bunk as most generators would seed randomly on start-up. The only thing I meant to convey was that you're not locked into any sort of pattern that would appear deterministic for any practical purpose. Since you bring it up though, what is the harm in occasionally re-seeding as long as the seed is random?
So what are you saying - computer random number generators aren't good enough because they aren't 'natural'? That's a completely unsubstantiated point of view that I'd expect to hear from some hippie Arts student. They're actually tested to validate the appropriate statistical properties (run lengths, low auto-correlation, probability density, etc.) and have extremely long repetition periods. You can re-seed them anytime if you're paranoid. This is guaranteed to be as good or better than what you'll get with any of the traditional methods (numbers in a phone book, coin flipping, etc.) or anything else you can dream up.
"I'm proposing a zero-profit operating budget this year. That would mean savings of almost twenty-one million kronor and the chance to beef up SMP's staff and finances. I'm also proposing wage cuts for management. I'm being paid a monthly salary of 88,000 kronor, which is utter insanity for a newspaper that can't add a job to it's sports desk."
"So you want to cut your own salary? Is this some sort of wage communism you're advocating?"
"Don't bullshit me. You make 112,000 kronor a month, if you add in your annual bonus. That's crazy. If the newspaper were stable and bringing in a tremendous profit, then you could pay out as much as you wanted in bonuses. But this is not time for you to be increasing your own bonus. I propose cutting all management salaries by half."
"What you don't understand is that our stockholders bought stock in the paper because they want to make money. That's called capitalism. If you arrange for them to lose money, then they won't want to be stockholders any longer".
"I'm not suggesting they should lose money, though it might come to that. Ownership implies responsibility. As you yourself pointed out, capitalism is what matters here. SMP's owners want to make a profit. But it's the market that decides whether you take a profit or a loss. By your reasoning, you want the rules of capitalism to apply solely to the employees, while you and the stockholders will be exempt. "
1) 5) Take a note from Ars Technica. They are getting better commenters, they have original content (why not have feature stories here). Ars's commenting system sucks, but yet they still manage higher quality comments.
Definitely not. Read Ars for the articles and slashdot for the comments. Somewhat unrelated, but the Ars owner and moderators went on a huge power trip a couple weeks ago, accusing anyone and everyone of trolling because one of their authors got butthurt over some well deserved flak pointed at a terrible article. The well-mannered-but-thoughtless types came crawling out of the woodwork in droves, whining about how big a problem trolling is (which it really isn't on Ars), which in many cases was code for "I want to be a shameless Apple fanboy without getting called out for it". Big moderation crackdown was threatened, many posts that weren't even in the real of trolling were deleted. You can't have a decent discussion if everyone is terrified of offending each other.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wondering for some time, is it just the number of business thugs in the world who profit off others' work that has increased? Percentage of politicians bought by lobbyists? Unethical lawyers? Judges with no spine? There has to be a reasonable explanation for the increasingly overzealous copyright lobby beyond "the internet" and "0 cent copies of digital data".
Give XNA a try. It allows you to create games for the Xbox or a Windows PC, and the developer license is only $100 a year. Since you have some C# experience, you should be able to get comfortable with it fairly quickly.
Talking on your phone requires somewhere on the order of 10kbps. Internet browsing or watching garbage quality youtube videos requires 500kbps to 1Mbps. That factor of 100 difference in data rate translates to 20dB difference in SNR (all other things being equal), so you should almost always be able to talk. You're probably right that poor data service is a coverage issue rather than a spectrum congestion issue in many cases, though, and that's ATT's fault for not adding more towers.
I honestly can't believe that U of T and Western would be bullied into to such an outrageous proposition, even if they were being paid money in an attempt by Access Copyright to gain a foothold so that other universities will fall in line. Although this upstanding company can surely be trusted with the contents of all faculty and student e-mail correspondences, including those containing original research ideas and algorithms that aren't intended to be disclosed to anyone else, it just doesn't sound like a good idea.
Vic has been part of some rather amusing drama as of late. Apparently, the "family values" man was divorced after knocking up his parliamentary assistant, as disclosed on a Twitter account with handle 'Vikileaks' who had access to the divorce proceedings. A local Ottawa newspaper then sent a twitter message with a honeypot link to Vikileaks in an attempt try to ascertain the IP address behind this account, and it led back to a Canadian parliament IP address. The Conservatives are now accusing the NDP of a smear campaign. I notice that Wikipedia has been sanitized since last night to remove any mention of Vikileaks.
http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/canada/article/1101662--toews-and-twitter-tit-for-tat-turns-tawdry
http://blogs.canada.com/2012/02/15/vikileaks-attacks-vic-toews-on-twitter/
Considering TFA also cites error rate as a problem, that sounds like a bad solution from a statistical standpoint. If you have N identical devices in a chain, each operating independently with the same error rate Pe, your overall probability of error is 1 - (1 - Pe)^N. This function increases approximately linearly as a function of N when Pe is small (the error rate for the chain is about N*Pe) .
Best video output possible? That sounds an awful lot like marketing department FUD unless the source resolution of the video signal is actually being increased. I'm sure it might be interesting for a few enthusiasts, but it seems awfully hard to justify the $100 price tag just for a format shift.
Except when you can get a composite to VGA converter for 30% of the price of this chip.
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=101&cp_id=10114&cs_id=1011407&p_id=4722&seq=1&format=2
When you take this system to its logical extreme, i.e., several thousand cameras in a city instead of just a few tens of them to catch people making traffic violations at intersections, it becomes a system to location track everyone anywhere they go. Aside from the prohibitive expense to maintain such a system, you don't have a problem with that?
No, we didn't win that battle. While we were celebrating the victory against metered billing, the CRTC was busy mandating that bulk leasing of existing lines (from Rogers and Bell to smaller competitors such as Teksavvy) would see a price increase. Rogers and Bell managed managed to extort us further by aiming absurdly high.
We're talking about a type of traffic that isn't usually throttled, doesn't require sustained performance for more than 10 seconds, and can be artificially inflated by ISPs to deceive their customers.
To Lemay Yates, who I strongly suspect is a shill that doesn't mind quoting the most favourable statistics to give an overall misleading impression (if not outright manufacturing them with flawed experiments), I ask how Rogers specifically fares in terms of:
-Average cost per monthly quota ($ per GB)?
-Average cost per upload speed ($ per Mbps)?
-Variation in ping and u/l, d/l speed during peak hours?
-How often multi-player video games are throttled?
-Performance beyond the local servers but still within Canada?
Well then, we should be able to look forward to a nice price drop on new games if this idea gets pushed through. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight ......
'Non-profit' doesn't carry that much weight when a bunch of the employees are making exorbitant salaries in the $300K-$700K range (page 9).
There was an interesting article on the academic publishing industry recently. When you get all the material refereed for free (actually, on the dime of the colleges and research institutes who pay the reviewer's salary), there's just no reason why the charges should be soaring up past $20 per article like they have in the last 10 years.
The greed doesn't stop there either. Not long ago I was a volunteer at a fairly prominent IEEE conference. The cost of attendance per person is in the $600-$1000 range. Despite contributing 12+ hours of work, one of the co-chairs had to fight with the organizers just to get them to foot the bill for our lunches.
So SDR is going to drive prices down? Not if we're to judge anything from the price of the development kits and software. It sounds like the end-all in theory, but realize that these devices generally work from (a lower) IF frequency down to baseband rather than being completely digital from RF all the way down. You still need an analog front-end in the receiver, and you get a bulkier, more power hungry, more expensive piece of hardware. The need for future-proof, reprogrammable radios is questionable when the hardware is obsolete in a matter of a few years.
Harangue? Lol, get a grip. You didn't answer anything. I was being polite, but I could tell from the first post that you're a person who blurts out every loosely grasped buzzword they've heard in order to come across as knowledgeable.
That has nothing to do with your original claim regarding RS codes and turbo codes, not does it address the main problem with your implication that bursts of errors are easily correctable. They aren't when the burst length is on the same order as the tolerable amount of latency, and all the processing power in the world does nothing to change that.
So Reed-Solomon is a random error correcting code and turbo codes are burst error correcting codes? That's a very misleading claim. In the past RS was often used to be used as the outer of two concatenated codes for its burst error correction capability.
Cranking up the redundancy or using a huge interleaver may be fine when a couple seconds of latency isn't a big problem (deep space communications, compact discs, etc.) but there's simply no good way to correct long bursts or errors in latency constrained applications such as this would be.
Just one small difference between theory and practice - UBB as envisioned by the Canadian telcos was never intended to be efficient, it was intended to make them more money without any further investment in the infrastructure. Do you really think they're going to concede anything on the low end of the bandwidth usage spectrum, for example by offering old-granny-1GB-per-month a $10 plan? Not a chance in hell. It's a means to punish people for actually using their connections for all those great things they're advertised for (gaming, video and music streaming, large downloads), foisted onto the consumer under the guise of 'fairness'.
Sure, score a small point for not letting Bell and Rogers increase the abuse, but our wired broadband status quo is still terrible. High prices, low monthly caps (60GB typical) with massive overage fees, absurd asymmetry between D/L and U/L rates (10 Mbps down / 0.5 Mbps up typical), unmitigated throttling any time the provider feels like it (apparently 65-85% of the time), 'unintentional' throttling of gaming, etc. Aside from the low caps, you can't even get around any of this by going with one of the smaller ISPs since AFAIK the leased lines are subject to the same 'traffic management' policies.
The service is pretty shitty also - video buffering on a 25Mbps D/L connection, ping to the west coast randomly spiking up to 400ms, problems that 5 calls to tech support over the period of a month and one modem replacement failed to resolve. The tech support guys and technicians all but admit that it's a policy issue rather than anything they can fix.
You've just made a subtle change from "content owner" to "content creator" having the right to make money. That's possibly not even the main issue though - it's about how long they're entitled to legal protection in making said money and when that eventually becomes a burden on society, defeating the intended purpose of copyright. Patent holders for serious inventions, as well as those who gave us technological advances without patenting (before it became such a craze), could only dream of being paid for their contributions for so long. Can you really claim that art deserves such disproportionately superior treatment? Even though you can't pin them down to something as simple as number of copied sold, many tech and math advances are very far reaching in terms of how they influence future work.
In the past I've heard people say it's a good idea when starting a math package, but I think that's probably bunk as most generators would seed randomly on start-up. The only thing I meant to convey was that you're not locked into any sort of pattern that would appear deterministic for any practical purpose. Since you bring it up though, what is the harm in occasionally re-seeding as long as the seed is random?
So what are you saying - computer random number generators aren't good enough because they aren't 'natural'? That's a completely unsubstantiated point of view that I'd expect to hear from some hippie Arts student. They're actually tested to validate the appropriate statistical properties (run lengths, low auto-correlation, probability density, etc.) and have extremely long repetition periods. You can re-seed them anytime if you're paranoid. This is guaranteed to be as good or better than what you'll get with any of the traditional methods (numbers in a phone book, coin flipping, etc.) or anything else you can dream up.
"I'm proposing a zero-profit operating budget this year. That would mean savings of almost twenty-one million kronor and the chance to beef up SMP's staff and finances. I'm also proposing wage cuts for management. I'm being paid a monthly salary of 88,000 kronor, which is utter insanity for a newspaper that can't add a job to it's sports desk."
"So you want to cut your own salary? Is this some sort of wage communism you're advocating?"
"Don't bullshit me. You make 112,000 kronor a month, if you add in your annual bonus. That's crazy. If the newspaper were stable and bringing in a tremendous profit, then you could pay out as much as you wanted in bonuses. But this is not time for you to be increasing your own bonus. I propose cutting all management salaries by half."
"What you don't understand is that our stockholders bought stock in the paper because they want to make money. That's called capitalism. If you arrange for them to lose money, then they won't want to be stockholders any longer".
"I'm not suggesting they should lose money, though it might come to that. Ownership implies responsibility. As you yourself pointed out, capitalism is what matters here. SMP's owners want to make a profit. But it's the market that decides whether you take a profit or a loss. By your reasoning, you want the rules of capitalism to apply solely to the employees, while you and the stockholders will be exempt. "
1) 5) Take a note from Ars Technica. They are getting better commenters, they have original content (why not have feature stories here). Ars's commenting system sucks, but yet they still manage higher quality comments.
Definitely not. Read Ars for the articles and slashdot for the comments. Somewhat unrelated, but the Ars owner and moderators went on a huge power trip a couple weeks ago, accusing anyone and everyone of trolling because one of their authors got butthurt over some well deserved flak pointed at a terrible article. The well-mannered-but-thoughtless types came crawling out of the woodwork in droves, whining about how big a problem trolling is (which it really isn't on Ars), which in many cases was code for "I want to be a shameless Apple fanboy without getting called out for it". Big moderation crackdown was threatened, many posts that weren't even in the real of trolling were deleted. You can't have a decent discussion if everyone is terrified of offending each other.