There was talk of a space "port" being setup in FNQ, Cape York, ten years ago with help from both the russians and nasa, the idea just seemed to fizzle out though.
From what I can remember, Cape York was favourable due to it's proximity to the equator, more centrifical force, thus making it a more ecconomical place to launch large payloads. Australia is also probably the most politically stable country this close to the equator as well and the weather at Cape York is very predictable between April and November, it just doesn't rain.
I don't know why they'd bother trying to setup a space station on xmas island, the extra costs of getting the stuff there would be more prohibitive than Cape York, ie, you can just truck the stuff to the cape (if they build a road, it's just a sandy track) and how many rocket scientists would want to go and work on a tropical island in the south pacific?
The woomera rocket range is much further south, no real advantage other than it's and old rocket range, nuclear test site and is closer to the major cities. It's also got an abandoned town there, big enough for hundreds of people to live quite comfortably, with shops and a cinema.
more detailed info on the cape york proposal:
http://www.gbhap.com/fulltext/free/S960040F793.h tm
Funnily enough, they actually did an advert for Australian-Rules Football a couple of years ago from Mia. They only had a few minutes each day to shoot about tens seconds of one of the cosmonaughts saying "......, I'd like to see that!" It took several days apparently but they got payed a lot for it.
There are several 'community' based wireless services starting up in Australia already although it looks like they're expanding quite slowly and without any real high-speed backbone access.
http://www.x.net.au
is a good example of such a service in Melbourne, they are mainly concentrating on the Mornington Peninsula but I've been enquiring about connecting with them from the other side of PH Bay, actually an inner suburb without any high bandwidth access apart from satellite, and it's looking quite promising:-)
Their site has some good links to other services interstate and they can sell you the gear you need with fairly limited (due to the relatively non-profit nature of the project) yet concise tech support.
I think the initial aim of the project was to get people to share their cable modems and DSL connections with the wireless users who cannot get such services and share the cost, shafting that most greedy and insidious of share-price blinded Australian companies, Telstra.
They were origionally talking about having a highbandwith connection that was payed for at wholesale rates (13-15c per MB down here!), which would end up being quite costly at the end of each month for the average user who has no idea what the bandwidth cost is for most of the stuff they download.
With pal cinetele (or IVTC) they usually speed the film up 4% to match the framerate so there's no frame duplication that causes the noticable jumps in long slow panning shots when you duplicate in "real time", not that complex but it does screw the sound production up a fair bit though.
The point I was trying to make though, is that you will ususally find several options for NTSC on equipement/software and only one with PAL, no big deal but still easier for the general population.
Not much of a point really, sorry;-)
What's funny is that's only a problem in Nth America (and a few other places).
I'm quite happy with having to select my TV frame rate as there is only one choice, 25fps(50hz), no screwing around with 29.97, drop or non drop frame?
I'd imagine (expect!!) that most linux, moreso/. readers, would know there tv's frame rate:p
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
on
Uplifting Dolphins
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· Score: 1
we have found such creatures:
http://www.koko.org/world/
Koko has been hold ing conversations for quite some time by the looks of it.
Do you really think that the pharmaceutical companies and the US FDA will allow this to happen?
Super-humans that can live for ever, have desease preventative genes and grow their own medicine aren't really good for generating profits.
As an aside: How would they stop genetic piracy? If they did produce apples that cured disease, how would they stop someone from planting the seeds or an off-cut to give to someone else?
Are there licencing issues with spider-goats, do you have to register each one that's born;-)
I don't really think our problems will be resolved at all and I'd bet on the exaserbation of quite a few other problems like natural mutation of virusues to bypass the the new genetic defences and loss of genetic diversity as has happened with penecillin.
And what happens when we have a planet full of super-humans the live forever? The planet over populates. So we start growing super plants that have a greater productive density than normal plants, yet the population continues to increase until we end up in the same position that we're in now except we've wiped out even more of te original ecosystem in order to feed more mouths.
And would the genetics companies give ability to design children away to the poorer people of the world? Doubt it, everyone would have to pay...
So we end up with an even greater divide between the haves and have nots.
I doubt this technology is at all about solving problems for the greater good over the longer term, it's only about making profit for profit's sake at the expense of the ecosystem for the shorter term.
Surround sound is an absolute con. Nothing of ANY worth ends up in the surrounds, it's not allowed to, it's an unwritten rule of film & TV mixing.
Before you completely disregard what I'm saying consider the following:
I was once Mixer/technichian at a fairly major sound post-production facility, before bailing on that industry a few years to persue a more structured career with better conditions, I ended up as a sys admin at a web company, so yes, I'm a ranting idiot who shouldn't be listened to:-|
Sound still has to be mixed to the lowest common denominator, mono. This ensures that any plot dialogue or crucial sound effects aren't lost when listened to on crap systems. And the quality of surrond sound is artificially destroyed by the Dolby encoding process for that reason. Basically, all that a mixer can put in the surround channels is a little wind or "atomsphere" noise, reverb and the occasional sound effect but nothing that isn't louder in the front speakers.
Unless you are setting yourself up with a rather large room where the left and right speakers are more than 12ft apart, I wouldn't, and don't, even bother with a center speaker for a home system. The phantom center created by a matched pair of speakers will be of better quality than a center speaker that isn't exactly the same. It really stands out as sound effects are panned across the screen with a center speaker that is different, you can hear the disparity in the frequency response and harmonics form the enclosure as the center is usually of lesser quality than the other two.
And unless you have a n accousticly perfect room, you won't even notice the missing surrounds as the sound form the front speakers bounces of the walls behind you sounds pretty much the same as the crap that would be coming form them anyway.
So my advice, just spend the money on a fairly good PAIR of speakers, amp, decoder and player, you'll be better off and your music listening experience will be less compromised as well.
I get by with a pair of Bang and Olufsen speakers hooked up to my system. It took me years to decide on what I wanted at home as I would troll around all the hifi stores trying to find that "perfect" setup that could match the studio I was working in. I gave up knowing that it was a futile excercise and I would never find such a system that I could afford.
While I've seen a couple of comments that disagree, the B&O stuff is brilliant. The build quality and design are first class and as far as the audio goes, you'd be hard pressed to find their equal in the price range, especially when you consider the fact that most fo the speakers are active so you don't have to buy an amp. Most opinions of B&O epuipment are formed through ignorance and heresay as they, for some unfathomably stupid reason, decide not to advertise the technical details or the manufacturing process of their products. I found out when a friend of mine scored a job there and I got to read the repair manuals and the manufacturing details. The only problem with B&O systems at the moment is that they don't have an AC3 decoder or even a DVD player but I'm told they're well on their way and should be released early this year.
This is getting too long, I will stop now before I go back over what I've written and start appending:)
Flame away audiophiles...
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There was talk of a space "port" being setup in FNQ, Cape York, ten years ago with help from both the russians and nasa, the idea just seemed to fizzle out though.
h tm
From what I can remember, Cape York was favourable due to it's proximity to the equator, more centrifical force, thus making it a more ecconomical place to launch large payloads. Australia is also probably the most politically stable country this close to the equator as well and the weather at Cape York is very predictable between April and November, it just doesn't rain.
I don't know why they'd bother trying to setup a space station on xmas island, the extra costs of getting the stuff there would be more prohibitive than Cape York, ie, you can just truck the stuff to the cape (if they build a road, it's just a sandy track) and how many rocket scientists would want to go and work on a tropical island in the south pacific?
The woomera rocket range is much further south, no real advantage other than it's and old rocket range, nuclear test site and is closer to the major cities. It's also got an abandoned town there, big enough for hundreds of people to live quite comfortably, with shops and a cinema.
more detailed info on the cape york proposal:
http://www.gbhap.com/fulltext/free/S960040F793.
Funnily enough, they actually did an advert for Australian-Rules Football a couple of years ago from Mia. They only had a few minutes each day to shoot about tens seconds of one of the cosmonaughts saying "......, I'd like to see that!" It took several days apparently but they got payed a lot for it.
How loing 'till we see one of those engines in a Lotus Elise or a Caterham 7 (or similar) ?
There are several 'community' based wireless services starting up in Australia already although it looks like they're expanding quite slowly and without any real high-speed backbone access. :-)
http://www.x.net.au
is a good example of such a service in Melbourne, they are mainly concentrating on the Mornington Peninsula but I've been enquiring about connecting with them from the other side of PH Bay, actually an inner suburb without any high bandwidth access apart from satellite, and it's looking quite promising
Their site has some good links to other services interstate and they can sell you the gear you need with fairly limited (due to the relatively non-profit nature of the project) yet concise tech support.
I think the initial aim of the project was to get people to share their cable modems and DSL connections with the wireless users who cannot get such services and share the cost, shafting that most greedy and insidious of share-price blinded Australian companies, Telstra.
They were origionally talking about having a highbandwith connection that was payed for at wholesale rates (13-15c per MB down here!), which would end up being quite costly at the end of each month for the average user who has no idea what the bandwidth cost is for most of the stuff they download.
With pal cinetele (or IVTC) they usually speed the film up 4% to match the framerate so there's no frame duplication that causes the noticable jumps in long slow panning shots when you duplicate in "real time", not that complex but it does screw the sound production up a fair bit though. The point I was trying to make though, is that you will ususally find several options for NTSC on equipement/software and only one with PAL, no big deal but still easier for the general population. Not much of a point really, sorry ;-)
And your sentence makes perfect grammatical sense. Well done :p
What's funny is that's only a problem in Nth America (and a few other places). I'm quite happy with having to select my TV frame rate as there is only one choice, 25fps(50hz), no screwing around with 29.97, drop or non drop frame? I'd imagine (expect!!) that most linux, moreso /. readers, would know there tv's frame rate :p
we have found such creatures: http://www.koko.org/world/ Koko has been hold ing conversations for quite some time by the looks of it.
Do you really think that the pharmaceutical companies and the US FDA will allow this to happen? Super-humans that can live for ever, have desease preventative genes and grow their own medicine aren't really good for generating profits. As an aside: How would they stop genetic piracy? If they did produce apples that cured disease, how would they stop someone from planting the seeds or an off-cut to give to someone else? Are there licencing issues with spider-goats, do you have to register each one that's born ;-)
I don't really think our problems will be resolved at all and I'd bet on the exaserbation of quite a few other problems like natural mutation of virusues to bypass the the new genetic defences and loss of genetic diversity as has happened with penecillin.
And what happens when we have a planet full of super-humans the live forever? The planet over populates. So we start growing super plants that have a greater productive density than normal plants, yet the population continues to increase until we end up in the same position that we're in now except we've wiped out even more of te original ecosystem in order to feed more mouths.
And would the genetics companies give ability to design children away to the poorer people of the world? Doubt it, everyone would have to pay...
So we end up with an even greater divide between the haves and have nots.
I doubt this technology is at all about solving problems for the greater good over the longer term, it's only about making profit for profit's sake at the expense of the ecosystem for the shorter term.
Surround sound is an absolute con. Nothing of ANY worth ends up in the surrounds, it's not allowed to, it's an unwritten rule of film & TV mixing. Before you completely disregard what I'm saying consider the following: I was once Mixer/technichian at a fairly major sound post-production facility, before bailing on that industry a few years to persue a more structured career with better conditions, I ended up as a sys admin at a web company, so yes, I'm a ranting idiot who shouldn't be listened to :-|
Sound still has to be mixed to the lowest common denominator, mono. This ensures that any plot dialogue or crucial sound effects aren't lost when listened to on crap systems. And the quality of surrond sound is artificially destroyed by the Dolby encoding process for that reason. Basically, all that a mixer can put in the surround channels is a little wind or "atomsphere" noise, reverb and the occasional sound effect but nothing that isn't louder in the front speakers.
Unless you are setting yourself up with a rather large room where the left and right speakers are more than 12ft apart, I wouldn't, and don't, even bother with a center speaker for a home system. The phantom center created by a matched pair of speakers will be of better quality than a center speaker that isn't exactly the same. It really stands out as sound effects are panned across the screen with a center speaker that is different, you can hear the disparity in the frequency response and harmonics form the enclosure as the center is usually of lesser quality than the other two.
And unless you have a n accousticly perfect room, you won't even notice the missing surrounds as the sound form the front speakers bounces of the walls behind you sounds pretty much the same as the crap that would be coming form them anyway.
So my advice, just spend the money on a fairly good PAIR of speakers, amp, decoder and player, you'll be better off and your music listening experience will be less compromised as well.
I get by with a pair of Bang and Olufsen speakers hooked up to my system. It took me years to decide on what I wanted at home as I would troll around all the hifi stores trying to find that "perfect" setup that could match the studio I was working in. I gave up knowing that it was a futile excercise and I would never find such a system that I could afford.
While I've seen a couple of comments that disagree, the B&O stuff is brilliant. The build quality and design are first class and as far as the audio goes, you'd be hard pressed to find their equal in the price range, especially when you consider the fact that most fo the speakers are active so you don't have to buy an amp. Most opinions of B&O epuipment are formed through ignorance and heresay as they, for some unfathomably stupid reason, decide not to advertise the technical details or the manufacturing process of their products. I found out when a friend of mine scored a job there and I got to read the repair manuals and the manufacturing details. The only problem with B&O systems at the moment is that they don't have an AC3 decoder or even a DVD player but I'm told they're well on their way and should be released early this year.
This is getting too long, I will stop now before I go back over what I've written and start appending :)
Flame away audiophiles...