But that doesn't mean the preconceptions you are guiding yourself with are true.
There are no preconceptions. Mono sound sucks. FM stops being a useful medium to listen to music and start being relegated to news, talkshow radio, and emergency responses as soon as the signal drops from stereo.
DAB+ still transmits at a range past this.
You can say what you want. I upgraded TO DAB+ due to frustrations of my weekly drive across Europe.
He who is satisfied with less may simply be unaware that there is more.
Are you talking about me, or you? You seem to be unaware of the "more" that is available. Specifically more coverage at listenable quality.
Seeing as how you are completely in the wrong here
I've been a radio engineer for many years. I've seen several technology transitions take place and in my time I've found that there is only one single true constant: Specs are meaningless, all that matters is what the end users thinks. You *think* I'm wrong. I *think* I'm right. All that means if if you ever have a project that involves me as a customer it will fail, and you may learn the hard way that justification based on specs doesn't work.
but you can benefit yourself from moving to a fact-based POV.
Given that I drive over 2000km every week across Europe, the "facts" that I established are that I am far happier with DAB+ coverage than I am with FM. But thanks for your alt-facts. I'll file them in the box in the shed next to my car's old FM radio.
There is precisely one country where the switch has happened, so your statement is a bit meaningless.
No there is precisely one country which no longer has FM. We're not talking about who turned off FM, we're talking about who adopted DAB+ which happens to be all of Europe, large parts of Asia, Australia, NZ, and several of the middle east. A few fools tried DAB and discovered it the turd that it is, several of them then wholesale switched to DAB+, except for the one we all love to hate: UK. A couple of countries also adopted DMB, South Korea being the biggest market there.... Oh but they are also running a DAB+ trial right now.
As to the largest choice of equipment, it still can't beat FM here fifteen years after the introduction.
All of which is completely irrelevant since it's not a digital radio standard and has serious downsides for spectral efficiency. But I agree frankly we were all crazy for ditching 78 RPM vinyl.
Now when you're done reading each point in isolation and justifying your point of view with something completely irrelevant try and understand the actual discussion taking place, I'll spell it out for you:
a) countries are adopting digital with a long term goal of freeing up the FM spectrum b) of the countries that are adopting digital the most popular format currently in use is DAB+ c) due to its popularity it also has the largest amount of compatible equipment on the market of any digital technology d) therefore due to its wide use it makes the most sense to switch to this standard even if better ones exist.
Actually it's not getting screwed, because Google are one of the few companies I trust to keep my information entirely to themselves and not wholesale sell it to a third party.
Again: I know where I stand with a company that has been consistent. I don't with a company that seems to come up with new stupid ideas every few months.
As for getting fucked? Yeah not feeling it. The other amazing thing about Google is for all the information they have gathered over the past 20 years they've done very little actual fucking. We don't hear an endless string of cases of data breaches, no leaks of personal information, no Google employees getting caught going through people's records, no people finding software fubars breaking up marriages due to strange suggestions, they don't send maternity product adverts to families of teens who haven't revealed they are pregnant, all in all I'm actually feeling a bit left out of the outrage. Maybe they just forgot to fuck me?
What they did do is provide a whole lot of products and services based on the information they collect that makes my daily life easier. But maybe that's what you're talking about when you say getting fucked? Heck I know my wife enjoys a good fucking, so maybe you were talking about the positive aspects.
Define perfectly working. You're comparing a standard that can't display 1920x1080 without fuzzy edges (VGA) to perfect 8K 60fps 30bit content (DisplayPort) VGA has been far from "working" for a long time now.
While you're at it you're also comparing a current OS to one that is out of mainstream support and already has shown support issues with various pieces of hardware on the market.
If that's your idea of "perfect" then its no wonder that the actions of people come as a surprise to you.
This! I remember downloading a crack for the Assassin's Creed game I purchased because I became frustrated in the game kicking me out if I had intermittent internet.
Though crack is a strong word, more like a local DRM server to fool the game into thinking it has connected to whatever shitty idea Ubisoft dumped out at the morning meeting of the retard convention.
Where I stand with Google is they collect a whole lot of information. This information is their critical bread and butter, it's their equivalent to the recipe for coke. They use this information to provide services to advert companies and to provide services to me with the benefit of knowledge that gives their services an edge over others. Their core competence is the strategic management of information.
Where I stand with Google is that they don't pull stupid shit like this. They protect my privacy by only selling aggregated services. The same can't be said for most other companies who's core business is not information management, as such they have no incentive not to sell my data in its raw form.
Google also has a LONG history of managing data, and in that long history they have shown to be quite trustworthy with it. They have from the start been quite consistent in their actions, unlike say Mozilla the bastion of privacy and openness suddenly doing stupid shit like this (and it's not the first time either).
Mozilla is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Google is a wolf in wolf's clothing.
So explain why Norway switched to DAB+... There isn't all that much equipment to choose from
Errr are you high? DAB+ has the largest choice of equipment from any digital radio standard. Shelves are literally stacked with DAB+ tuners, portable ones, boom boxes, all from major brands. Every car audio brand has DAB+ to choose from. And there're several manufacturers offering DAB+ in cars, which is several more than any other standard.
As for broadcasting rights, hardly. In countries where the switch to DAB+ has happened there haven't been any new rights created. Just that existing stations with existing rights now have additional slots wherein they launch a few alternate stations as well. These aren't licensed separately but are usually part of the base allocation in many countries.
Given how it was common knowledge that Google scan documents put on Google's servers since their service basically launched, I don't think you know what the term "caught" really means.
By better sound quality, do they mean the signal isn't compressed six ways to Tuesday so music sounds tinny, weak and as if it's coming through a wire a raccoon is chewing on?
Yes that's exactly what they mean. The vast majority of the stations sound just fine. Early moves to DAB are what sounded horrible. 96kbps sounds like utter garbage in MP2 which cemented much of the digital radio reputation, but is plenty good enough in AAC.
It makes zero sense to switch TO DAB+, it is legacy before it gets implemented.
The great thing about legacy is that there's just soooo much equipment on the market to chose from. Why would a country switch to DAB+? Because other countries have. That alone is a very powerful and sensible reason to adopt something.
For each advancement in everything humans have done complexity has increased. If it were achievable with zero complexity then we likely would have achieved that stage earlier in our development.
If you want to get very historical, AM wasn't simple. What was simple was spark gap transmitter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It worked very well over very long distances and needed only the most crudest of equipment to work. The problem is it wasn't very selective and was incredibly noisy across a very wide spectrum.
Which brings me to a nice segway:
Frankly I don't see the advantage of doing this
Quality is just a small part of why the transition happened. A large part is spectral efficiency. You can now cram >10 DAB+ stations in the same space as a single FM station. Spectrum is a very valuable resource and across many industries efficient use of the spectrum has been a very critical requirement. It's the same reason why many governments issued an order for 25kHz land-mobile licencees to switch to 12.5kHz or to switch to digital and return part of their allocation. The move to DAB+ and turning off the FM transmitters was in large part to claim back some spectrum to be used for other purposes.
You can have a perfectly steady FM signal at low levels with a constant noise level - and a pretty low one at that if you keep the stereo decoding off
So what you're saying is if you degrade your expectations to the point where you would probably turn off the radio due to crap sound then you're better than DAB+
Sorry but your post is nonsense. If an FM signal drops from stereo to mono, that was the edge of meaningful coverage for a music listener. FM may have an advantage in emergency situations where through hisses and fuzzing you can still hear someone talk, but for music well, regardless of what you say I now listen to the same station far longer than when travelling across the continent than when I had just an FM receiver.
Remember the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Spectrum is a finite resource. Analogue broadcasts on useful spectrum are effectively "broke" in the modern age. It's not just FM. If you go ask for a land mobile license you won't get it for an analogue transmitter anymore either, and they expect you to make do with frequencies with vastly narrower bandwidth.
An analog FM signal slowly fades over distance. A digital radio signal is fine one moment, than nothing, and the nothing happens at a much closer range.
Closer is a matter of opinion. Having switched from FM to DAB+ myself last year I find I'm happily able to listen to DAB+ in areas where I've turned off the FM out of frustration.
In an emergency situation I agree, FM carries further and you can hear meaningful data through noise, especially when the stereo signal drops out. But when listening to music, FM will hiss and burp, and drop from stereo to mono while the DAB signal just keeps on humming along.
So Norway has switched to a radio system with less coverage
Critical coverage yes. But this isn't a 2-way critical landmobile radio setup. The pleasant coverage is quite a bit larger on DAB+,.... at least in other parts of Europe.
That is true and I see this as vendors try to push equipment as a service rather a thing. That is mostly driven by customers who lack the expertise and yet want more reliability out of equipment. Easy for a large refinery or chemical plant as they will have dedicated reliability teams monitoring rotating equipment with state of the art instrumentation. However some small remote gas compression station, or in other struggling industries the vendors have come up with some cloud based service with remote experts to manage your equipment.
Siemens isn't the only culprit (though actually I haven't directly experienced it from them), I had a meeting with Emerson one day, 2h meeting to show of their new products and services. The first slide talked about connecting all their transmitters to some cloud service using HART-IP. I asked them to skip every slide that mentioned cloud service or any data leaving the confines of our process network. Good news is I reclaimed 1.5h of my day. Bad news is, WTF were they thinking.
"Prescription" in this context means the optical characteristics of the lenses needed to correct your vision. Not a doctor's authorization to purchase, like a drug prescription.
If you don't have your latest prescription from your eye doctor, most eyeglass shops will be happy to measure your current glasses to determine your old prescription, then grind duplicate lenses.
That's an interesting assessment and completely out of line with other anecdotes here on/. as well as out of line with the supposed "news" in this story. that OMG OUTRAGE someone bought contacts without a correct doctors prescription.
If what you were saying is true, we wouldn't be discussing this right now.
Then you have all these brand new safety devices that have ethernet/IP or Profinet, with complete full access to the device.
Wow there tiger. All systems need some kind of ethernet / IP link for communication, even if it's just for the initial config. "Remote" is hardly considered "across the internet" In most cases where the vendors advertise "remote" they basically mean no longer dragging a laptop to the device to plug into the serial port on the front.
Remote configuration is a must, just that "remote" in this case is from 2 rooms away via a closed network.
I doubt they will lose any certifications over this. There is nothing in either the IEC standard, UL or NFPA standards against this.
Read my second reply to myself. In this case it turns out the attack was purely on the engineering station which was multi-homed to a network for remote desktop purposes, and the system was left permanently in program mode (which is idiotic). You're right in any case, I got my IEC standards confused, 61508 applies to vendors, 61511 applying to process industry end users is the one which has requirements for control of authority for changes to systems. All 61508 does is require access control to be considered during the risk assessment phase.
relays that cost less than $10 (When they normally cost over $100) with all the certifications you could imagine, all of them legitimate.
My personal favourite is seeing a TUV certificate for a well known US based vendor's valve actuator listing a reliability of 2 FITS. That's only about 3 orders of magnitude better than generally expected experience in the industry. I agree a TUV certificate these days isn't worth the paper its printed on... right until you get caught without one:-) The certification industry is a bit of a farce.
Triconex systems have a physical keyswitch on chassis 1 which is by default setup to allow 4 states: Run, Remote, Program, and Stop. Remote in this case allows writing modbus values to the system over the network and prevents all memory access. Program allows writing over the running program memory.
Based on the analysis by Dragos https://dragos.com/blog/trisis... it would appear the customer was running with the switch permanently in program mode and the attacker got in via RDP to the engineering workstation.
This is multi-level stupid by the customer bypassing a whole host of protections, bridging networks, and allowing a foreign and remote connection to the engineering station. This kind of thing is heavily warned against by Schneider's own manuals and implementation guides. Someone better have been fired over this.
Slashdot Mirror
But that doesn't mean the preconceptions you are guiding yourself with are true.
There are no preconceptions. Mono sound sucks. FM stops being a useful medium to listen to music and start being relegated to news, talkshow radio, and emergency responses as soon as the signal drops from stereo.
DAB+ still transmits at a range past this.
You can say what you want. I upgraded TO DAB+ due to frustrations of my weekly drive across Europe.
He who is satisfied with less may simply be unaware that there is more.
Are you talking about me, or you? You seem to be unaware of the "more" that is available. Specifically more coverage at listenable quality.
Seeing as how you are completely in the wrong here
I've been a radio engineer for many years. I've seen several technology transitions take place and in my time I've found that there is only one single true constant: Specs are meaningless, all that matters is what the end users thinks. You *think* I'm wrong. I *think* I'm right. All that means if if you ever have a project that involves me as a customer it will fail, and you may learn the hard way that justification based on specs doesn't work.
but you can benefit yourself from moving to a fact-based POV.
Given that I drive over 2000km every week across Europe, the "facts" that I established are that I am far happier with DAB+ coverage than I am with FM. But thanks for your alt-facts. I'll file them in the box in the shed next to my car's old FM radio.
There is precisely one country where the switch has happened, so your statement is a bit meaningless.
No there is precisely one country which no longer has FM. We're not talking about who turned off FM, we're talking about who adopted DAB+ which happens to be all of Europe, large parts of Asia, Australia, NZ, and several of the middle east. A few fools tried DAB and discovered it the turd that it is, several of them then wholesale switched to DAB+, except for the one we all love to hate: UK. A couple of countries also adopted DMB, South Korea being the biggest market there. ... Oh but they are also running a DAB+ trial right now.
As to the largest choice of equipment, it still can't beat FM here fifteen years after the introduction.
All of which is completely irrelevant since it's not a digital radio standard and has serious downsides for spectral efficiency. But I agree frankly we were all crazy for ditching 78 RPM vinyl.
Now when you're done reading each point in isolation and justifying your point of view with something completely irrelevant try and understand the actual discussion taking place, I'll spell it out for you:
a) countries are adopting digital with a long term goal of freeing up the FM spectrum
b) of the countries that are adopting digital the most popular format currently in use is DAB+
c) due to its popularity it also has the largest amount of compatible equipment on the market of any digital technology
d) therefore due to its wide use it makes the most sense to switch to this standard even if better ones exist.
Actually it's not getting screwed, because Google are one of the few companies I trust to keep my information entirely to themselves and not wholesale sell it to a third party.
Again: I know where I stand with a company that has been consistent. I don't with a company that seems to come up with new stupid ideas every few months.
As for getting fucked? Yeah not feeling it. The other amazing thing about Google is for all the information they have gathered over the past 20 years they've done very little actual fucking. We don't hear an endless string of cases of data breaches, no leaks of personal information, no Google employees getting caught going through people's records, no people finding software fubars breaking up marriages due to strange suggestions, they don't send maternity product adverts to families of teens who haven't revealed they are pregnant, all in all I'm actually feeling a bit left out of the outrage. Maybe they just forgot to fuck me?
What they did do is provide a whole lot of products and services based on the information they collect that makes my daily life easier. But maybe that's what you're talking about when you say getting fucked? Heck I know my wife enjoys a good fucking, so maybe you were talking about the positive aspects.
perfectly working
Define perfectly working. You're comparing a standard that can't display 1920x1080 without fuzzy edges (VGA) to perfect 8K 60fps 30bit content (DisplayPort)
VGA has been far from "working" for a long time now.
While you're at it you're also comparing a current OS to one that is out of mainstream support and already has shown support issues with various pieces of hardware on the market.
If that's your idea of "perfect" then its no wonder that the actions of people come as a surprise to you.
This! I remember downloading a crack for the Assassin's Creed game I purchased because I became frustrated in the game kicking me out if I had intermittent internet.
Though crack is a strong word, more like a local DRM server to fool the game into thinking it has connected to whatever shitty idea Ubisoft dumped out at the morning meeting of the retard convention.
Where I stand with Google is they collect a whole lot of information. This information is their critical bread and butter, it's their equivalent to the recipe for coke. They use this information to provide services to advert companies and to provide services to me with the benefit of knowledge that gives their services an edge over others. Their core competence is the strategic management of information.
Where I stand with Google is that they don't pull stupid shit like this. They protect my privacy by only selling aggregated services. The same can't be said for most other companies who's core business is not information management, as such they have no incentive not to sell my data in its raw form.
Google also has a LONG history of managing data, and in that long history they have shown to be quite trustworthy with it. They have from the start been quite consistent in their actions, unlike say Mozilla the bastion of privacy and openness suddenly doing stupid shit like this (and it's not the first time either).
Mozilla is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Google is a wolf in wolf's clothing.
So explain why Norway switched to DAB+... There isn't all that much equipment to choose from
Errr are you high? DAB+ has the largest choice of equipment from any digital radio standard. Shelves are literally stacked with DAB+ tuners, portable ones, boom boxes, all from major brands. Every car audio brand has DAB+ to choose from. And there're several manufacturers offering DAB+ in cars, which is several more than any other standard.
As for broadcasting rights, hardly. In countries where the switch to DAB+ has happened there haven't been any new rights created. Just that existing stations with existing rights now have additional slots wherein they launch a few alternate stations as well. These aren't licensed separately but are usually part of the base allocation in many countries.
I keep my shopping bag in my pocket you insensitive clod.
You truly have no idea what you're talking about.
Quite simple: All your fancy talk means nothing if I am less frustrated by the quality and range of DAB+ over FM.
If I wanted to listen to music in mono to get your much lauded extra range I'd just listen to AM in the first place.
Blah blah non-free blah blah. At least I know where I stand with Google.
With Mozilla I'm never quite sure. I saw an update the other day, well spin the barrel and pull the trigger, what did they screw up today.
Google was recently caught
Given how it was common knowledge that Google scan documents put on Google's servers since their service basically launched, I don't think you know what the term "caught" really means.
DAB doesn't
DAB+ does.
But I'm sure my opinion is just based on the fact I didn't have monster cables in my car audio system.
By better sound quality, do they mean the signal isn't compressed six ways to Tuesday so music sounds tinny, weak and as if it's coming through a wire a raccoon is chewing on?
Yes that's exactly what they mean. The vast majority of the stations sound just fine. Early moves to DAB are what sounded horrible. 96kbps sounds like utter garbage in MP2 which cemented much of the digital radio reputation, but is plenty good enough in AAC.
It makes zero sense to switch TO DAB+, it is legacy before it gets implemented.
The great thing about legacy is that there's just soooo much equipment on the market to chose from. Why would a country switch to DAB+? Because other countries have. That alone is a very powerful and sensible reason to adopt something.
Living in the Netherlands I get the exact opposite. I can pick up some 10 stations on FM, and a cool 95 on DAB+.
But since you're in SF you're not using DAB+ are you.
For each advancement in everything humans have done complexity has increased. If it were achievable with zero complexity then we likely would have achieved that stage earlier in our development.
If you want to get very historical, AM wasn't simple. What was simple was spark gap transmitter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It worked very well over very long distances and needed only the most crudest of equipment to work. The problem is it wasn't very selective and was incredibly noisy across a very wide spectrum.
Which brings me to a nice segway:
Frankly I don't see the advantage of doing this
Quality is just a small part of why the transition happened. A large part is spectral efficiency. You can now cram >10 DAB+ stations in the same space as a single FM station. Spectrum is a very valuable resource and across many industries efficient use of the spectrum has been a very critical requirement. It's the same reason why many governments issued an order for 25kHz land-mobile licencees to switch to 12.5kHz or to switch to digital and return part of their allocation. The move to DAB+ and turning off the FM transmitters was in large part to claim back some spectrum to be used for other purposes.
You can have a perfectly steady FM signal at low levels with a constant noise level - and a pretty low one at that if you keep the stereo decoding off
So what you're saying is if you degrade your expectations to the point where you would probably turn off the radio due to crap sound then you're better than DAB+
Sorry but your post is nonsense. If an FM signal drops from stereo to mono, that was the edge of meaningful coverage for a music listener. FM may have an advantage in emergency situations where through hisses and fuzzing you can still hear someone talk, but for music well, regardless of what you say I now listen to the same station far longer than when travelling across the continent than when I had just an FM receiver.
Remember the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Spectrum is a finite resource. Analogue broadcasts on useful spectrum are effectively "broke" in the modern age. It's not just FM. If you go ask for a land mobile license you won't get it for an analogue transmitter anymore either, and they expect you to make do with frequencies with vastly narrower bandwidth.
Unlike your crystal radio people actually have DAB receivers.
An analog FM signal slowly fades over distance. A digital radio signal is fine one moment, than nothing, and the nothing happens at a much closer range.
Closer is a matter of opinion. Having switched from FM to DAB+ myself last year I find I'm happily able to listen to DAB+ in areas where I've turned off the FM out of frustration.
In an emergency situation I agree, FM carries further and you can hear meaningful data through noise, especially when the stereo signal drops out. But when listening to music, FM will hiss and burp, and drop from stereo to mono while the DAB signal just keeps on humming along.
So Norway has switched to a radio system with less coverage
Critical coverage yes. But this isn't a 2-way critical landmobile radio setup. The pleasant coverage is quite a bit larger on DAB+, .... at least in other parts of Europe.
That is true and I see this as vendors try to push equipment as a service rather a thing. That is mostly driven by customers who lack the expertise and yet want more reliability out of equipment. Easy for a large refinery or chemical plant as they will have dedicated reliability teams monitoring rotating equipment with state of the art instrumentation. However some small remote gas compression station, or in other struggling industries the vendors have come up with some cloud based service with remote experts to manage your equipment.
Siemens isn't the only culprit (though actually I haven't directly experienced it from them), I had a meeting with Emerson one day, 2h meeting to show of their new products and services. The first slide talked about connecting all their transmitters to some cloud service using HART-IP. I asked them to skip every slide that mentioned cloud service or any data leaving the confines of our process network. Good news is I reclaimed 1.5h of my day. Bad news is, WTF were they thinking.
"Prescription" in this context means the optical characteristics of the lenses needed to correct your vision. Not a doctor's authorization to purchase, like a drug prescription.
If you don't have your latest prescription from your eye doctor, most eyeglass shops will be happy to measure your current glasses to determine your old prescription, then grind duplicate lenses.
That's an interesting assessment and completely out of line with other anecdotes here on /. as well as out of line with the supposed "news" in this story. that OMG OUTRAGE someone bought contacts without a correct doctors prescription.
If what you were saying is true, we wouldn't be discussing this right now.
If they wait and the bubble pops
How about waiting until the person is found guilty before selling off his assets?
Then you have all these brand new safety devices that have ethernet/IP or Profinet, with complete full access to the device.
Wow there tiger. All systems need some kind of ethernet / IP link for communication, even if it's just for the initial config. "Remote" is hardly considered "across the internet" In most cases where the vendors advertise "remote" they basically mean no longer dragging a laptop to the device to plug into the serial port on the front.
Remote configuration is a must, just that "remote" in this case is from 2 rooms away via a closed network.
I doubt they will lose any certifications over this. There is nothing in either the IEC standard, UL or NFPA standards against this.
Read my second reply to myself. In this case it turns out the attack was purely on the engineering station which was multi-homed to a network for remote desktop purposes, and the system was left permanently in program mode (which is idiotic). You're right in any case, I got my IEC standards confused, 61508 applies to vendors, 61511 applying to process industry end users is the one which has requirements for control of authority for changes to systems. All 61508 does is require access control to be considered during the risk assessment phase.
relays that cost less than $10 (When they normally cost over $100) with all the certifications you could imagine, all of them legitimate.
My personal favourite is seeing a TUV certificate for a well known US based vendor's valve actuator listing a reliability of 2 FITS. That's only about 3 orders of magnitude better than generally expected experience in the industry. I agree a TUV certificate these days isn't worth the paper its printed on ... right until you get caught without one :-) The certification industry is a bit of a farce.
Replying to self with more information.
Triconex systems have a physical keyswitch on chassis 1 which is by default setup to allow 4 states: Run, Remote, Program, and Stop. Remote in this case allows writing modbus values to the system over the network and prevents all memory access. Program allows writing over the running program memory.
Based on the analysis by Dragos https://dragos.com/blog/trisis... it would appear the customer was running with the switch permanently in program mode and the attacker got in via RDP to the engineering workstation.
This is multi-level stupid by the customer bypassing a whole host of protections, bridging networks, and allowing a foreign and remote connection to the engineering station. This kind of thing is heavily warned against by Schneider's own manuals and implementation guides. Someone better have been fired over this.