Well tech support mainly dealt with stupid user questions, unlike n6mod who I think is a REAL technician. The kind of guy they would tell "Go hunt down this stolen laptop with these special scanners and antenna's!"
Actually, I did sniff out a stolen laptop (actually a stolen van) using the Ricochet Network. If you search for my posts on previous Ricochet topics, you'll find that the owner of that van posted, and I replied.
And yeah, when the early adopters went away, and all I was doing was explaining to people that even though it was a wireless modem, you still had to a) plug it into the wall to charge the battery, and b) plug it into the serial port, I left TS. Did a short stint in SQA before I was laid off (as a direct result of announcing Autobahn. Classic Osborne Effect).
In some way, you're both right. Metricom disabled P2P connectivity over the network at some point during the death-spiral. So you could connect to a peer you could directly see, but you couldn't do a radio-nameserver lookup.
I think. By the time that happened, I only had one radio. (a Merlin)
FWIW, both old and new systems use Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum. It's not "to avoid collisions", it's the nature of the system. This gives you good frequency reuse, and as the orignial form of spread spectrum allows you to run meaningful amounts of power as a Part 15 device.
The 900MHz links are certainly FHSS, the 2.4GHz links probably are, and the WCS links most likely are not.
FHSS is (or at least was) very much a part of the engineering "religion" at MCOM. Rightly so, Direct Sequence systems don't do well in the face of many kinds of interference, and it's not the best approach for unlicensed wireless systems. (Which is why your 2.4GHz phone has such an effect on your 802.11b card.)
Because the serial ports on the poletops were always set to 9600 baud. Changing 304 on a poletop would do exactly zip to throughput through that poletop.
Your understanding of the entire system is bascially flawed. 304 is the DCE speed ONLY. Nothing to do with the radio. The original "28.8" Ricochet had an over-the-air rate of 100kbps. The original system also used the same protocol and frequencies between the portable and poletop as it did between poletops (and therefore poletop to WAP).
If you RDest'ed into a poletop, there was another S-register (one of the 800's, it's been years) that contained the actual radio speed: 100000. Change that and you just bricked the poletop.;)
Saying that MCOM was ripping off the customer based on this bogus analysis of the system might have had a bit more to do with your longevity there.;)
As to the "Autobahn" system, development certainly did continue after the first Phase 1 shipped. Autobahn (the 128k system) was a massive re-engineering, using higher speed (256k? Faster? Anyone know?) 900MHz links to the portables, and 2.3GHz (WCS) and 2.4GHz (Part 15) links from WAP to poletop and poletop-to-poletop. Going to WCS helped bound the latency, which was always an issue with the original network.
Yes, you could get 100kbps from the old radios in Starmode. (Check out/dev/st0, boys and girls!)Yes, Starmode was initially supported in the Autobahn system, but sadly went the way of peer-to-peer connections under the brain-dead Dreisbach administration. Perhaps Aaronson will remember the glory days of the early network and lift that restriction.
And, to get back to the original subject line, what killed Ricochet the first time was overpriced modems and service (which Aaronson seems to have corrected), horrible marketing, and serious overextension, trying to build out too many cities too fast. There were other brain-dead decisions along the way, going all the way back to announcing Autobahn in '97 and not delivering it until '00, killing Starmode and P2P, &c.
Oh, and "next to the storage area" described the location of tech support for most of the time I was there, even though that was a couple of different locations. Tech Support was next to the doors from the small parking lot when I was there.
I was one of the buyers in that co-op, and PayPal was truly amazing. I can't imagine a more fscked organization. They froze Jake's account, yet when us buyers called to complain, they insisted that "Mr. Schlacter has your money."
No, I said, "PayPal has my money, Jake can't get it because PayPal has frozen his account."
"We're concerned about fraud."
"If there's fraud being committed, it's by PayPal. We have paid you for a service, namely delivering funds to Mr. Schlacter. You have done no such thing, yet you have our funds."
"Mr. Schlacter has your money. I can't confirm his account status to you, but if his account has been frozen, it's because of something he's done, and he'll have to speak to us about it."
"He hasn't done anything. He is trying to do us a service, and we're sending funds to him. Can you make a note on his account that I have called, that I have not been defrauded by him, and that I insist that my funds be transferred to Mr. Schlacter immediately?"
"Mr. Schlachter has your funds."
And so it went...
When Jake finally did get hold of PayPal, it was difficult to deal with their arbitrary ID requirements, since (as is typical of college students away at school) Jake had some documents with his home (parents') address and some with his school address.
Really, go read the thread that NathanM linked above. I can't believe these idiots are still around.
Satellite distribution to the theaters. Prints are expensive ($5k), heavy (had to be 100lbs including the cans, maybe more) and fragile. (ever notice how badly beat up a print gets after a while.
A good 35mm film may offer more resolution than 1920x1080, but not much. And 35mm movie stock is not what I'd call "good." look, a 35mm film frame is 24mm by 18mm. I just looked up the specs for 5399, which is a common print film. It's rated at 80 lines/mm at 1.6:1, or 200 lines/mm at 1000:1. So for low-contrast scenes, 35mm is 1920*1440, at maximum contrast, it's more like 4800x3600.
Now, that's the print film. This is the highest quality the studio could hope to distribute on 35mm film. But what about the camera film? Looking at 7239, it's only 40 lines/mm at 1.6:1 and 100 lines/mm at 1000:1. So now we're talking about between 960x720 (720p, anyone?) and 2400x1800. And even if you print from the original camera negative (which nobody ever does) you still lose some resolution in the optics.
So...1080p24 is "as good as" 35mm.
Yes, if you want higher quality, you have to go to 70mm or Imax (which are not the same thing, BTW). At IBC in '00, I remember seeing 1920x1080 at really high (72p?) frame rates being discussed as the new "uber-format" since it could be downsampled to both HD and film easily.
Your numbers are all slightly off, but you're on the right track. For the record:
DVDs hold 4.7GB (where G=10^9) per side/layer. Most "Hollywood" DVDs are single-side/dual-layer, or "DVD-9" for 9.4GB of capacity. GB/hr is a screwy metric, most people use Mb/s to describe video datarates. So, DVD maxes out at 9.8Mb/s (in the spec) but typical movies are more like 6-7Mb/s so there's room for all those "Special Features"
TV Broadcasts have a little more than 4.5MHz of bandwidth (that's just the video spectrum, the channel spacing is 6MHz, and there's not that much guardband) but trying to apply terms like 10Ms/s and 24-bit color doesn't really work.
First off, all video is chroma encoded, which means you have luminance, plus (actually minus) two chroma components. Full D1 (CCIR601, SDI, whatever you want to call it) is 720x480, and runs at 270Mb/s.
MPEG-2 usually subsamples the chroma components (there are two schemes, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0, but explaining them is beyond the scope of this post) before compression. This is true of Satellite, DVD and PVR hardware.
MPEG-2 also allows for reduced horizontal resolution. "Half-Res" or 352x480 is quite common for satellite, and IIRC the TiVo encodes at 480x480.
Which brings me to the next point: PVR hardware. None of the current PVRs have a software codec. They use hardware MPEG-2 encoders/decoders. The (original) Tivo has a 54MHz PPC403 for a CPU, but it also has a HW MPEG-2 codec. The DirecTivo (as has been mentioned) doesn't do any encoding at all, but just stores the bitstream, and decodes (in HW again) at playback.
FWIW, you can do realtime MPEG2 encoding in software on roughly 1GHz PIII-class CPUs, and there are encoders that take advantage of AltiVec to go even faster on G4s.
Now, typical bitrates:
D1: 270Mb/s (uncompressed)
DV: 26Mb/s (as in MiniDV camcorders)
DVD: 5-10Mb/s (MPEG2)
DSS/Digital Cable: 1.5-4Mb/s (MPEG2)
TiVo: I'd have to hunt this up, but IIRC, there were a few rates from around 1Mb/s to about 3.5Mb/s (MPEG2)
To get back to the original point...yeah, you could get a PVR with twin 160GB drives to hold every episode of the X-Files. And since both DirecTV and AT&T Broadband have, by marketing fiat, declared 1.5Mb/s "perfect digital quality," There's plenty of room.
Re:NATO Commander was one of the early ones.
on
HIstory of RTS Games
·
· Score: 2
I had forgotten NATO Commander.
That said, I was completely apalled that Bolo didn't even get a mention.
To quote the author: "Bolo is a 16 player graphical networked real-time multi-player tank battle game. It has elements of arcade-style shoot-em-up action, but for the serious players who play 12 hour games with 16 players working in teams in different networked computer clusters around an office or university campus, it becomes more of a strategy game. You have to play it to understand."
Or does being network enabled back in '87 somehow disqualify it as an RTS?
And the 2.5k$ gigabit router? Not. A commodity PC cannot even reach maximum throughput on a single gigabit NIC, nevermind routing between them. The only way to do this would be to use a decent server-class M/B with 64bit/66MHz PCI bus - which would take the total system cost above 2.5k$
Show your work.
I routinely build sub-$2k machines with 64-bit/66MHz GigE NICs. Server-class Mobos are only $500, and if you use copper, you can get NICs for $200. The LX NICs will be more, but still sub-$500 in small quantities. So that leave the rest of the PC, which is less than $1k.
This, of course highlights the stupidity of current FAA regs on what can be carried aboard aircraft these days. Leaving aside the possiblity that I'll have an easier time hijacking a plane by beating people with my shoes than threatening them with a nail clipper...
Lighters (and likely these methanol cartridges) are banned on board. Yet I can carry my Lithium-Ion powered Magnesium laptop on board. Have you ever seen a Magnesium fire? Right, but it's hard to light. Now, have you ever seen a Lithium fire? Do you know what happens when you short a Li-Ion battery? (Heck some Apple, and I think IBM Li-Ions didn't even need to be shorted)
So we're all allowed to something that approximates a thermite grenade, but they're worried about nail files. [sigh]
Bruce Schneier was right. It's not about security, it's about the appearance of security to convince the sheeple to fly.
You've obviously never been a journalist. (Or even near one...)
One of the things that I remember over and over again from photojournalism courses were the stories of cameras being smashed by people who didn't want their picture taken. But the film survived.
If your recorder gets smashed to the pavement by an angry politician, a MMC will likely survive where a disk won't.
Actually, the Vaio MX series desktops have MD drives in a bay. They brag about 24x recording, so one would assume that you could extract audio at something >1x.
OTOH, Sony is a party to the "all your bits are belong to us" groupthink that brought us the DMCA and the AHRA before it, so they probably think they own your analog recordings and will prohibit you from doing anything with them.;)
(Before the pedants surface, yes, the SCMS bits should be set to at least "copy once" if not "copy many" on a MD recorded from analog inputs. I have a CO3, so I never pay attention.)
They showed me this at NAB last April. This company actually has a pretty good product offering for using MP3 for radio remotes. ISDN is very common in Europe, and you can do a better-than-FM broadcast quality remote over a single ISDN line if you have realtime MP3 codecs. This is aimed squarely at journalists, and despite what the whiners in the audience may think, 128kbps MP3 is better than FM broadcast by a good stretch.
If they'd actually ship it, it might be worthwhile.
And let me say this again:
No fixed-point, No OGG. Deal with it.
I've been thinking of putting this in a letter to Carly for some time now. Of course, more people will read it here (a few) than if I send it to her (zero), so here goes:
Ms. Fiorina,
As a Silicon Valley native, I have been very concerned with what has happened to a local institution under your control. Over the past few years, we have seen Hewlett-Packard shrivel from a industry giant in several sectors to a PC and server vendor that is struggling to be considered tier-one.
As such, I offer the following advice:
1. Give calculators to Agilent. You and Mr. Morris made a lot of enemies by announcing the dissolution of ACO. However, handing the reins to Agilent seems like a simple solution. It seems that the vast majority of HP calculator customers are likely to be Agilent customers anyway. Even though you and Mr. Morris have destroyed ACO, HP calculators have survived gaps in R&D efforts before. Perhaps Mr. Barnholt's team will be able to rehire some of the talent in Australia, and failing that I'm sure that he can recruit some excellent embedded system developers, both from inside and outside of HP and Agilent.
2. Give the Hewlett-Packard name to Agilent. I'm sure that Mr. Barnholt would be delighted to bring the prestige of the Hewlett-Packard name back to the Test and Measurement business. Furthermore, this move would neatly solve many of your current problems. The copies of The HP Way sent to you by your employees and observers must surely be piling up by now, getting rid of the HP name will likely get the Hewlett and Packard heirs off your back, since their forefathers' legacy would be Mr. Barnholt's to protect.
These two moves would leave you free to pursue your aspirations to build a printer and server powerhouse, and might even keep you in the PC business, despite your recent comments.
You would, however, need a name for this new company. Might I suggest Compaq?
You're willing to shoot somebody over your right to watch TV? Get a grip...
No, he's willing to shoot somebody over his rights under The Constitution. There were a lot more like him at the end of the 18th Century.
"The day the police raid my door..."
It's not that he's going to take up arms over TV, it that he's going to take up arms over the corporatization of law enforcement. And he's right to do so...
Bayer lost aspirin because it was siezed by the government, along with a lot of other German assets at the beginning of WWII. Bayer still holds the trademark everywhere else in the world, AFAIK.
Kleenex, Coke, and Pepsi, are all vehemently defending their trademarks, though I think they're all in trouble.
What will it take to get them to support vorbis !?!?!?!
An integer Vorbis decoder. How many times do I have to shout this from the rooftops. Excluding the hardware-decoder players, <SARCASM> which are doomed to failure because they won't play Microsoft's decreed format, </SARCASM> every one of the current crop of players could play Vorbis, if there were an integer decoder. None of these machines have FPUs and they certainly don't have enough horsepower for FPU emulation to keep up with an audio stream.
If the Vorbis team would make an integer-only decoder happen "now" instead of "eventually", they'd see a lot more market adoption. Microsoft figured this out, why can't Vorbis?
Broadcasters can also choose to deliberately reduce the bandwidth even on a 1080i feed to make sure there is headroom. Nobody would really notice with the current generation of HDTV sets available anyway.
Hogwash. You can certainly see the difference on the current HDTVs, especially if the bandwidth reduction is being done by a greedy affiliate. (And therefore decoding/recoding to get the bandwidth, there are cleaner ways, but they're more expensive)
KQED in San Francisco is actually fairly committed to DTV and HDTV. They run all the HD PBS programming they can get, and when there isn't any, they simulcast the SD signal, and use the remaining 15Mbps for an HD demo loop. You can clearly see degradation in some of the clips in the demo loop, due to the bandwidth reduction. And that's only a 4.4Mbps reduction, not the 8-9Mbps you suggest.
Slashdot Mirror
So yeah, I know where some of these folks are, but there's no reason to reminisce in public.
Email me: n6mod at milewski dot org
Well tech support mainly dealt with stupid user questions, unlike n6mod who I think is a REAL technician. The kind of guy they would tell "Go hunt down this stolen laptop with these special scanners and antenna's!"
Actually, I did sniff out a stolen laptop (actually a stolen van) using the Ricochet Network. If you search for my posts on previous Ricochet topics, you'll find that the owner of that van posted, and I replied.
And yeah, when the early adopters went away, and all I was doing was explaining to people that even though it was a wireless modem, you still had to a) plug it into the wall to charge the battery, and b) plug it into the serial port, I left TS. Did a short stint in SQA before I was laid off (as a direct result of announcing Autobahn. Classic Osborne Effect).
-Z
Yeah, I sorta thought that as I was writing the post, but the docs for STRIP do reference the st0 interface.
Hmmm....
-Z
In some way, you're both right. Metricom disabled P2P connectivity over the network at some point during the death-spiral. So you could connect to a peer you could directly see, but you couldn't do a radio-nameserver lookup.
I think. By the time that happened, I only had one radio. (a Merlin)
-Z
Do I have a decent chance of using telnet, ssh, or playing Counterstrike with this wireless network?
Yes, Yes, No
FWIW, both old and new systems use Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum. It's not "to avoid collisions", it's the nature of the system. This gives you good frequency reuse, and as the orignial form of spread spectrum allows you to run meaningful amounts of power as a Part 15 device.
The 900MHz links are certainly FHSS, the 2.4GHz links probably are, and the WCS links most likely are not.
FHSS is (or at least was) very much a part of the engineering "religion" at MCOM. Rightly so, Direct Sequence systems don't do well in the face of many kinds of interference, and it's not the best approach for unlicensed wireless systems. (Which is why your 2.4GHz phone has such an effect on your 802.11b card.)
Because the serial ports on the poletops were always set to 9600 baud. Changing 304 on a poletop would do exactly zip to throughput through that poletop.
;)
;)
/dev/st0, boys and girls!)Yes, Starmode was initially supported in the Autobahn system, but sadly went the way of peer-to-peer connections under the brain-dead Dreisbach administration. Perhaps Aaronson will remember the glory days of the early network and lift that restriction.
Your understanding of the entire system is bascially flawed. 304 is the DCE speed ONLY. Nothing to do with the radio. The original "28.8" Ricochet had an over-the-air rate of 100kbps. The original system also used the same protocol and frequencies between the portable and poletop as it did between poletops (and therefore poletop to WAP).
If you RDest'ed into a poletop, there was another S-register (one of the 800's, it's been years) that contained the actual radio speed: 100000. Change that and you just bricked the poletop.
Saying that MCOM was ripping off the customer based on this bogus analysis of the system might have had a bit more to do with your longevity there.
As to the "Autobahn" system, development certainly did continue after the first Phase 1 shipped. Autobahn (the 128k system) was a massive re-engineering, using higher speed (256k? Faster? Anyone know?) 900MHz links to the portables, and 2.3GHz (WCS) and 2.4GHz (Part 15) links from WAP to poletop and poletop-to-poletop. Going to WCS helped bound the latency, which was always an issue with the original network.
Yes, you could get 100kbps from the old radios in Starmode. (Check out
And, to get back to the original subject line, what killed Ricochet the first time was overpriced modems and service (which Aaronson seems to have corrected), horrible marketing, and serious overextension, trying to build out too many cities too fast. There were other brain-dead decisions along the way, going all the way back to announcing Autobahn in '97 and not delivering it until '00, killing Starmode and P2P, &c.
Oh, and "next to the storage area" described the location of tech support for most of the time I was there, even though that was a couple of different locations. Tech Support was next to the doors from the small parking lot when I was there.
-Z
Ricochet Tech Support 2/95-5/97
I was one of the buyers in that co-op, and PayPal was truly amazing. I can't imagine a more fscked organization. They froze Jake's account, yet when us buyers called to complain, they insisted that "Mr. Schlacter has your money."
No, I said, "PayPal has my money, Jake can't get it because PayPal has frozen his account."
"We're concerned about fraud."
"If there's fraud being committed, it's by PayPal. We have paid you for a service, namely delivering funds to Mr. Schlacter. You have done no such thing, yet you have our funds."
"Mr. Schlacter has your money. I can't confirm his account status to you, but if his account has been frozen, it's because of something he's done, and he'll have to speak to us about it."
"He hasn't done anything. He is trying to do us a service, and we're sending funds to him. Can you make a note on his account that I have called, that I have not been defrauded by him, and that I insist that my funds be transferred to Mr. Schlacter immediately?"
"Mr. Schlachter has your funds."
And so it went...
When Jake finally did get hold of PayPal, it was difficult to deal with their arbitrary ID requirements, since (as is typical of college students away at school) Jake had some documents with his home (parents') address and some with his school address.
Really, go read the thread that NathanM linked above. I can't believe these idiots are still around.
-Z
This just in:
The DoJ and Customs department have announced that Slugs(TM) are in fact a violation of the DMCA...
Advantages are clear:
Satellite distribution to the theaters. Prints are expensive ($5k), heavy (had to be 100lbs including the cans, maybe more) and fragile. (ever notice how badly beat up a print gets after a while.
A good 35mm film may offer more resolution than 1920x1080, but not much. And 35mm movie stock is not what I'd call "good." look, a 35mm film frame is 24mm by 18mm. I just looked up the specs for 5399, which is a common print film. It's rated at 80 lines/mm at 1.6:1, or 200 lines/mm at 1000:1. So for low-contrast scenes, 35mm is 1920*1440, at maximum contrast, it's more like 4800x3600.
Now, that's the print film. This is the highest quality the studio could hope to distribute on 35mm film. But what about the camera film? Looking at 7239, it's only 40 lines/mm at 1.6:1 and 100 lines/mm at 1000:1. So now we're talking about between 960x720 (720p, anyone?) and 2400x1800. And even if you print from the original camera negative (which nobody ever does) you still lose some resolution in the optics.
So...1080p24 is "as good as" 35mm.
Yes, if you want higher quality, you have to go to 70mm or Imax (which are not the same thing, BTW). At IBC in '00, I remember seeing 1920x1080 at really high (72p?) frame rates being discussed as the new "uber-format" since it could be downsampled to both HD and film easily.
Heck, one season is only 20-25 episodes, right? At 1GB/hr, roughly, you could put ten seasons on a $1000 PVR. (I did say every episode, didn't I?)
Your numbers are all slightly off, but you're on the right track. For the record:
DVDs hold 4.7GB (where G=10^9) per side/layer. Most "Hollywood" DVDs are single-side/dual-layer, or "DVD-9" for 9.4GB of capacity. GB/hr is a screwy metric, most people use Mb/s to describe video datarates. So, DVD maxes out at 9.8Mb/s (in the spec) but typical movies are more like 6-7Mb/s so there's room for all those "Special Features"
TV Broadcasts have a little more than 4.5MHz of bandwidth (that's just the video spectrum, the channel spacing is 6MHz, and there's not that much guardband) but trying to apply terms like 10Ms/s and 24-bit color doesn't really work.
First off, all video is chroma encoded, which means you have luminance, plus (actually minus) two chroma components. Full D1 (CCIR601, SDI, whatever you want to call it) is 720x480, and runs at 270Mb/s.
MPEG-2 usually subsamples the chroma components (there are two schemes, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0, but explaining them is beyond the scope of this post) before compression. This is true of Satellite, DVD and PVR hardware.
MPEG-2 also allows for reduced horizontal resolution. "Half-Res" or 352x480 is quite common for satellite, and IIRC the TiVo encodes at 480x480.
Which brings me to the next point: PVR hardware. None of the current PVRs have a software codec. They use hardware MPEG-2 encoders/decoders. The (original) Tivo has a 54MHz PPC403 for a CPU, but it also has a HW MPEG-2 codec. The DirecTivo (as has been mentioned) doesn't do any encoding at all, but just stores the bitstream, and decodes (in HW again) at playback.
FWIW, you can do realtime MPEG2 encoding in software on roughly 1GHz PIII-class CPUs, and there are encoders that take advantage of AltiVec to go even faster on G4s.
Now, typical bitrates:
D1: 270Mb/s (uncompressed)
DV: 26Mb/s (as in MiniDV camcorders)
DVD: 5-10Mb/s (MPEG2)
DSS/Digital Cable: 1.5-4Mb/s (MPEG2)
TiVo: I'd have to hunt this up, but IIRC, there were a few rates from around 1Mb/s to about 3.5Mb/s (MPEG2)
To get back to the original point...yeah, you could get a PVR with twin 160GB drives to hold every episode of the X-Files. And since both DirecTV and AT&T Broadband have, by marketing fiat, declared 1.5Mb/s "perfect digital quality," There's plenty of room.
I had forgotten NATO Commander.
That said, I was completely apalled that Bolo didn't even get a mention.
To quote the author: "Bolo is a 16 player graphical networked real-time multi-player tank battle game. It has elements of arcade-style shoot-em-up action, but for the serious players who play 12 hour games with 16 players working in teams in different networked computer clusters around an office or university campus, it becomes more of a strategy game. You have to play it to understand."
Or does being network enabled back in '87 somehow disqualify it as an RTS?
And the 2.5k$ gigabit router? Not. A commodity PC cannot even reach maximum throughput on a single gigabit NIC, nevermind routing between them. The only way to do this would be to use a decent server-class M/B with 64bit/66MHz PCI bus - which would take the total system cost above 2.5k$
Show your work.
I routinely build sub-$2k machines with 64-bit/66MHz GigE NICs. Server-class Mobos are only $500, and if you use copper, you can get NICs for $200. The LX NICs will be more, but still sub-$500 in small quantities. So that leave the rest of the PC, which is less than $1k.
This, of course highlights the stupidity of current FAA regs on what can be carried aboard aircraft these days. Leaving aside the possiblity that I'll have an easier time hijacking a plane by beating people with my shoes than threatening them with a nail clipper...
Lighters (and likely these methanol cartridges) are banned on board. Yet I can carry my Lithium-Ion powered Magnesium laptop on board. Have you ever seen a Magnesium fire? Right, but it's hard to light. Now, have you ever seen a Lithium fire? Do you know what happens when you short a Li-Ion battery? (Heck some Apple, and I think IBM Li-Ions didn't even need to be shorted)
So we're all allowed to something that approximates a thermite grenade, but they're worried about nail files. [sigh]
Bruce Schneier was right. It's not about security, it's about the appearance of security to convince the sheeple to fly.
You've obviously never been a journalist. (Or even near one...)
One of the things that I remember over and over again from photojournalism courses were the stories of cameras being smashed by people who didn't want their picture taken. But the film survived.
If your recorder gets smashed to the pavement by an angry politician, a MMC will likely survive where a disk won't.
Seems far fetched, but it is reality.
Actually, the Vaio MX series desktops have MD drives in a bay. They brag about 24x recording, so one would assume that you could extract audio at something >1x.
;)
OTOH, Sony is a party to the "all your bits are belong to us" groupthink that brought us the DMCA and the AHRA before it, so they probably think they own your analog recordings and will prohibit you from doing anything with them.
(Before the pedants surface, yes, the SCMS bits should be set to at least "copy once" if not "copy many" on a MD recorded from analog inputs. I have a CO3, so I never pay attention.)
They showed me this at NAB last April. This company actually has a pretty good product offering for using MP3 for radio remotes. ISDN is very common in Europe, and you can do a better-than-FM broadcast quality remote over a single ISDN line if you have realtime MP3 codecs. This is aimed squarely at journalists, and despite what the whiners in the audience may think, 128kbps MP3 is better than FM broadcast by a good stretch.
If they'd actually ship it, it might be worthwhile.
And let me say this again:
No fixed-point, No OGG. Deal with it.
I've been thinking of putting this in a letter to Carly for some time now. Of course, more people will read it here (a few) than if I send it to her (zero), so here goes:
Ms. Fiorina,
As a Silicon Valley native, I have been very concerned with what has happened to a local institution under your control. Over the past few years, we have seen Hewlett-Packard shrivel from a industry giant in several sectors to a PC and server vendor that is struggling to be considered tier-one.
As such, I offer the following advice:
1. Give calculators to Agilent.
You and Mr. Morris made a lot of enemies by announcing the dissolution of ACO. However, handing the reins to Agilent seems like a simple solution. It seems that the vast majority of HP calculator customers are likely to be Agilent customers anyway. Even though you and Mr. Morris have destroyed ACO, HP calculators have survived gaps in R&D efforts before. Perhaps Mr. Barnholt's team will be able to rehire some of the talent in Australia, and failing that I'm sure that he can recruit some excellent embedded system developers, both from inside and outside of HP and Agilent.
2. Give the Hewlett-Packard name to Agilent.
I'm sure that Mr. Barnholt would be delighted to bring the prestige of the Hewlett-Packard name back to the Test and Measurement business. Furthermore, this move would neatly solve many of your current problems. The copies of The HP Way sent to you by your employees and observers must surely be piling up by now, getting rid of the HP name will likely get the Hewlett and Packard heirs off your back, since their forefathers' legacy would be Mr. Barnholt's to protect.
These two moves would leave you free to pursue your aspirations to build a printer and server powerhouse, and might even keep you in the PC business, despite your recent comments.
You would, however, need a name for this new company. Might I suggest Compaq?
You're willing to shoot somebody over your right to watch TV? Get a grip...
No, he's willing to shoot somebody over his rights under The Constitution. There were a lot more like him at the end of the 18th Century.
"The day the police raid my door..."
It's not that he's going to take up arms over TV, it that he's going to take up arms over the corporatization of law enforcement. And he's right to do so...
Time to start dumping TV's in Boston Harbor.
-Z
Bayer lost aspirin because it was siezed by the government, along with a lot of other German assets at the beginning of WWII. Bayer still holds the trademark everywhere else in the world, AFAIK.
Kleenex, Coke, and Pepsi, are all vehemently defending their trademarks, though I think they're all in trouble.
What will it take to get them to support vorbis !?!?!?!
An integer Vorbis decoder. How many times do I have to shout this from the rooftops. Excluding the hardware-decoder players, <SARCASM> which are doomed to failure because they won't play Microsoft's decreed format, </SARCASM> every one of the current crop of players could play Vorbis, if there were an integer decoder. None of these machines have FPUs and they certainly don't have enough horsepower for FPU emulation to keep up with an audio stream.
If the Vorbis team would make an integer-only decoder happen "now" instead of "eventually", they'd see a lot more market adoption. Microsoft figured this out, why can't Vorbis?
...to anyone who's ever put a Ceramic EPROM in the programmer backwards.
Hogwash. You can certainly see the difference on the current HDTVs, especially if the bandwidth reduction is being done by a greedy affiliate. (And therefore decoding/recoding to get the bandwidth, there are cleaner ways, but they're more expensive)
KQED in San Francisco is actually fairly committed to DTV and HDTV. They run all the HD PBS programming they can get, and when there isn't any, they simulcast the SD signal, and use the remaining 15Mbps for an HD demo loop. You can clearly see degradation in some of the clips in the demo loop, due to the bandwidth reduction. And that's only a 4.4Mbps reduction, not the 8-9Mbps you suggest.
-Zandr
And how does it decide what sources to accept? Source address?