Items and a retail box which holds them aren't permanently linked. Many items are produced and shipped then put inside a box. Granted, a lot of the stuff coming to the US from Asia is already in a box. But a tag on the box only allows validation of the box, not the contents. About a month ago I ordered some stuff from OfficeMax and the CDRW drive was not in the delivery box. They claim it left their shipping depot. Well, it wasn't in the box, which was partially crushed, btw. How long did it take me to get this straightened out? 3 weeks and about 2 hours on the phone. How does "personal integrity" stop this from happening?
The simple fact is there is a huge amount of problem with items that disappear or aren't where they should be.
This notion that somehow someone is going to build a system to monitor everything every Joe Blow does is monstrously naive. The computing power and infrastructure requirement to accomplish that is nigh impossible. People who make these kinds of claims have probably never done any real transaction modeling. If they had, they'd quickly understand just how much "data" would truly need to be gathered, stored and analyzed.
Want some real world examples of how this affects pricing? OK, the rep from General Mills walks down the cereal isle at your grocery store and can instantly tell how many boxes of whatever are there. She then walks through the storage area. Inventory is done. You can't do that with a bar code, it requires unique ids which are remotely sensed.
Expand that scenario to every product in every store. The cost/time savings of inventory recording/analysis/planning are incredible. Fact of the matter is the economy of the world has made American employees almost too expensive. Costs have to be cut somewhere. It's either people or process.
Personal integrity is not the absolute answer. That was a silly comment and really more flamebait than discussion. The answer is obvious, if you don't want non-invasive ability to identify actual items, instead of boxes, you have a choice: embedded id tags or much higher cost. Higher cost means higher price.
Complaining about this is about the same as the ridiculousness that surrounded grocery stores using bar codes or that stupidity on the West Coast where the $150K+ year shoremen refused to offbear shipping containers which had what? Oh, remotely-sensed IDs and very simple barcoding. Why did they refuse this? To keep their $150K+ jobs moving crates on the docks. In essence, they were more interested in protecting their own personal profit based on an antiquated process than the big picture. All those $150K/yera doc workers mean more money you have to pay for goods.
Complaining about RFID is the same thing. In the end, nobody is going to care about paranoid fantasies. They want goods available at a low price, period. RFID and other non-invasive ID technologies will decrease cost and increase quality of the dsitribution process.
Oh, and this idea that someone is going to track you? C'mon, 300 million people moving through the U.S. each generating potentially millions of transactions (from a modeling standpoint, any time you move through a door, start a car, do any activity...) That's a SciFi movie. The vast majority of us aren't THAT important.
(just in case someone catches my userid, yes, I'm not in the service now, now I'm in sales.)
I've been selling manufacturing equipment for boxes for about 6 years.
RFID tags have many, many uses in warehousing. The idea that an RFID will somehow automatically lead to an invasion of privacy is silly.
Sometimes RFID tags are used so the forklift operator knows what's on a pallet they're moving. The traditional way is to hang a piece of paper from the load. However, paper can and does fall off, get ripped, etc.
RFID can also be used on physical portals to measure traffic. A huge amount of savings can be made in a warehouse by knowing where the physical bottlenecks are. The most cost-effective and reliable way to do this is a system of non-invasive sensing and automatic data collection. Ever been in warehousing operations? There's a LOT going on and it's easy to lose stuff. I've had trouble finding a shipment at a customs depot that was only garage-sized. Everything is a different size, shape, and appearance.
Will the FUD never stop?
Ever buy something like a power tool, CD, or memory strip from a retailer? There's an inventory control strip in there, right? Duh.
Beyond that, do some investigation to the problems of bar codes. Betcha didn't know there's a very limited number of options there which are basically exhausted. Ever consider the sensing difference between barcodes and RFID? Hmm...maybe you could know what something is and what's INSIDE without having to physically touch the box.
Yes, I know there are barcode readers that work at a distance. They don't work THROUGH other boxes. How do you know what's inside a mixed pallet of boxes which is sealed with plastic wrap? How better to detect a discrepancy between shipping documents and the actual items than by non-invasively knowing AND COUNTING what's inside such a mixed pallet?
RFID and other non-invasive knowledge technologies don't automatically mean you are being spied on. It's far more likely a way to increase efficiency and lower costs. We DO live in a price-competitive society, don't we?
As far as the reply about tracking what you buy. Uh...ever hear of credit cards and so-called discount cards at retailers?
A common misconception is that the NSA buys/evaluates software the same way Joe Blow does.
I've been there and written code. Got a joint service commendation medal for software work for nuke command & control. The review process for critical code is excruciating.
This article is a lot of FUD.
Did you notice they don't make ANY claim whatsoever about what TYPE of software development? Hmmmm...that's interesting.
It's always possible espionage can happen. Having said that, there's a LOT that goes on at the NSA. Look at the publicly available pictures of the headquarters building. Ever wonder what it takes to feed and supply people and keep it clean?
There are different levels of software oversight, just as in the "outside" world. Yes, IRTA, and all I see is what looks like someone who was outside the loop making FUD statements about what's inside the loop.
Did you notice this doofus hasn't been on the job that long? Did you notice he was "alarmed" that the names of people were available? Well, duh!!
If you need to contact someone because you're contractually obligated to them, don't you need to know who they are and how to reach them? My family could pick up the phone and call me at work anytime they wanted and they met a lot of the people I worked with. This guy has watched too much TV. How does he think contrators communicate with the NSA? Trap doors and dead drops?
FWIW, I've never used or owned a shoe phone. Nor did we talk under a cone of silence.
Personally, I like "Alias" but let's get real, everyone doesn't sneak around through hidden doors with code names.
To my eyes, this guy didn't have access to much of anything. Maybe he wanted to get into the secure side of the development and was refused. Hmmm..ya think?
*pssst* (yeah, you, who thinks you know what you're talking about...) You don't have an integrated TiVo, do you?
I've got a whoel room ful of video processing equipment. Even so, there is a big differecne between getting access to the stored satellite stream on an integrated TiVo's hard drives and using pro-level digitizing equipment on the video-out connectors on a TiVo, even with the S-Video connector.
For an integrated TiVo, what you propose includes one D/A-A/D sequence, for a standalone TiVo with no digital feed, there are 2 of those sequences.
If you want quality, you don't use analog cables. If you want to quickly burn DVD or SVCD, you get rid of the analog steps.
A "pig in a poke" means a bag with a piglet in it, the traditional way of selling a piglet because it's a lot easier to carry that way.
"Letting the cat out of the bag" refers to the other traditional way of selling a "pig in a poke" that is really a cat. The purchaser isn't expected to look inside the bag until they've gotten home out of the risk the piglet will escape. When they do look, they find out the truth.
Why should the RIAA check their "sources"? They're making a lot of money/press by blackmail and coercion.
Just a matter of time before they pick on the wrong people.
It would be interesting to see how many time the RIAA systems access servers with restricted use policies: "Ve haf found der pirate!!!!" "No, you've trespassed on the private server of esquires Anastacia Lopez and Santana Aguilera of the law firm that prosecuted the tobacco settlement. Pay up."
Here's a good example of what can be done to clean up video.
http://konstant.web1000.com/SpotRemoved.avi
Imagine how this could get rid of dropouts. I guess it's all a question of what you want to do. If you want QND, don't process. If the image is something you really want high quality, process properly.
wrt the comment somebody else made about capturing at 640x480:
video pixels are not square and 640x480 has no proper reationship to VHS resolutions. Capture at 720x480 and downsize. You're trying to fit a curve which means you want to sample at a multitude of the initial frequency then downsize to a proper video size.
640x480 would mean a distortion during the sample then a distortion when you change the size to be standards-compliant.
Then again, you could also get in a time machine and go beat some sense into the farmboy who invented TV so it would match computer resolutions and be progressive....But I digress;)
miniDV is a horrible option. Anyone who suggests that hasn't really worked with the format much. It's great for camcorders but not archival of this volume.
You DO need a good deck. I use an upper-end JVC S-VHS deck with integrated comb, genlock, and digital buffer to stabilize. The importance of a clean incoming signal CANNOT be overstated. Garbage in, garbage out and bandwidth wasted. S-Video is important because it delivers a far higher quality image. Composite video mushes parts of the signal together.
For the bulk of my straight archival I use an Athlon-based system with USB2 connected to an ADS USB Instant DVD MPEG-2 encoder and an iMic USB sounde device.
USB2 is important because you need lots of available bandwidth. The iMic uses the same AD/DA chip as some of teh pro Roland devices. Doing the sound grab outside the computer's case helps cut down on noise. (Yes, I use a USB extension and the iMic is "housed" near the VCR.
Some people prefer the Snazzi USB encoders. I found the ADS, factory refurbished, at TigerDirect for $150. hard to find a hardware capture at that price.
I've also got a Canon DV camcorder with passthrough and an ATi All-in-Wonder. Neither is a good solution. DV is HUGE compared to the quality of the source and any cheap capture card has poor performance. If you want to spend $1K for a Canopus, well, that's a different story...
For plain-vanilla VHS and S-VHS you're going to be just fine if you use CVD which is half DVD resolution and is compatible with the DVD spec.
Which leads to storage medium. You can burn CVDs to CDR if you want. It's cheap because, at least in the U.S., you can find CDRs for full rebate a lot and the drives also. Right now, if you're lucky, you'll find both at OfficeMax.com. Alternately, got to DVD.
Now, a word about bitrates: Your comment that a DVD can't hold 2 hours is incorrect. Sounds like you tried and captured at too high a data rate for your source.
If you're willing to re-compress, you can easily use various clean-up filters and get at least as good an image as you have on tape, putting 3.5-4 hours per disc in CVD format on a DVDR. That's not a typo. If you properly use filters the result of cleanup on onld VHS source can be better than the raw version. There are filters specifically to deal with the various colorswim and dropouts of magnetic tape.
For a list of links and info on hacking the ADS capture device:
utils@mindspring.com
A/V Utils for the Masses!!!
Curator of links at
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/
yoru first comment, I can't be too direct about this but I'll try to explain with an example you can test yourself. Some ATM machines have a time delay mechanism when they eject the user's card. If the card sits in the reader too long, it is pulled back in and the account locked until a bank person resets everything. That's an example of hardware enforcing procedure. Initiating a national asset weapons includes a series of steps, personal actions and hardware requirements that must be done in a specific order for it to work.
Uh...which generation of Pattiot? Do you know what it was originally designed to do? Scud-busting was an admitted quick hack.
The current generation, used in Iraq the past month, did do what it was supposed to. The jets it knocked down failed IFF interrogation so that makes them targets.
wrt, falling debris. Well, duh. Why wouldn't that exist and have a potential to create soem kind of damage? If something's in the air and it blows up, pieces fall down. That's true of everything. Heck, I shot a duck once and shot came back to Earth, so did the dead duck.
The assumption that "SDI" is only effective during what is considered a boost phase only makes sense if you think it's impossible to detect/track/target/destroy MIRVs. As far as being more difficult to destroy during the re-entry phase, why? Wouldn't they be generating a lot of heat? Might be easier to detect then?
Why assume a missile would be an alley-oop, over the top lob and not a low-flying cruise?
wrt test firings of ICBMs, sure LAUNCH was tested under very controlled conditions. Those only flew a short distance, were unarmed, and flew west from the California coast. Find a map that shows magnetic anomalies. AFAIK, none have been fired over the North Pole. That's a heck of a lot different than crews in the field knowing they have real weapons and the only launch orders that come in that environment are real. So...they haven't been "tested" as much, in that regard, as you might think.
SDI, the term, is a little outdated and if you try to limit it to 20-year-old concepts and technologies, you'll be misleading yourself.
Everything about the moon program was NOT civilian and was NOT publicly available. It still isn't.
There were some intercepts that were faked during the Reagan era. Heck of a payoff those had, huh? Soviet Union collapsed because they knew they couldn't compete. In that regard, the system WAS successful. (Sun Tzu: the goal is to get the enemy to surrender without having to fight...) Same with those $600 toilet seats. ("Komrade, they have these huge money scandals and still completely outclass us, we can't compete.")
I'm not excusing graft, just trying to illustrate a point.
Lots of things were screwed up on the Bradley project, too. (There's a really cool movie about that, forget the name.) As I recall, the M-16 was also a real mess at first.
Your conclusion has a number of statements for which you have no validation. It's based on a hypothetical future condition so, by definition, there's no way to state what the outcome will be. history has shown the exact opposite of what you claim to be true. Surface mount electronics, GPS, fiber optics, etc., etc., etc. all come from technologies the military needed. Why would anything based in space be different?
FWIW, and I know this will irk anyone who has a dogmatic hatred of the military, the first real historic use machining tools and practices was to make uniform firearms. Everything came from that. So, basically, all the quality controla nd manufacturing processes we use, outside hand operations, trace their roots to military needs.
Let's ignore the sarcasm that comes from ignorance and deal with the actual question that is buried somewhere inside it.
If you're going to design something, you need to know how it is to be used. Operational experience of national asset weapons is limited to a very small subset of military officers. All I can really say is that development of operational issues and equipment for nationlal asset weaponry is controlled by veteran handlers. (FWIW, there is no such thing as a lifetime no-talk commitment, it's 70 years from last point of access, I've still got a few years to go;) My grandfather was the civilian head of contracting at Oak Ridge during WWII and he wouldn't talk about anything before he died. Even to me, which was frustrating, I'd been doing CoS-level stuff and really wanted to know about the history.)
There have been quite a few astronauts with highly advanced engineering degrees. Maybe some have helped with thruster design. I don't know about that
By the illogic you use here, there would be NO feedback loop in design of any sort and all users is incapable of design.
Missileers have one, or very rarely, 2 tours as launch officers then go into other areas. Some stay in related roles like code handling, etc. It's not exactly the kind of experience that can be carried outside the realm you've learned it in.
I've been a missile launch officer and worked on design of these systems while stationed at an agency that Hollywood seems to think is a bunch of hotshot secret agents performing martial arts moves Bruce Lee couldn't have perfected.
The 6 sigma (or whatever it is) analysis that goes into Space Shuttle stuff doesn't compare to the level of analysis/oversight for these types of systems.
Major weapons systems include, at least in the U.S. military, design elements commonly referred to as positive control and assurance. Well, similar terms depending on the weapons system.
These are to make sure the people/systems issuing a comand are the proper ones and also that what is commanded happens.
There are so many layers of hardware and procedure involving split knowledge, time-sensitive authorization, and configuration compliance that it is nigh impossible for any major system to be activated improperly or on a whim.
A LOT of thought and attention goes into these systems. Real Genius, War Games, Top Gun, Spies Like Us, etc. were fictional movies. Those don't represent the way things really are any more than Alias shows what the CIA and NSA are really like.
Sub-systems are tested for everything, just as they are for other major endeavors like a new car design.
There certainly comes a time of first use for any system. ALL our weapons systems are thoroughly tested before they're actually used. The missiles whose keys I controlled as a laungh officer were the same type that were test-launched from Vandenberg AFB a number of times. Had we ever launched one directly at some Soviet base to see if it would really work? No. Does that mean it wouldn't? No.
The basic premise that because something hasn't been done it is inherently impossible to predict what will happen just doesn't make sense. Every day the overwhelming majority of things you do have never happened before in the histoyr of human existance. (You've never put that pen to that piece of paper in exactly that manner, etc.)
Having said all of that, I agree that ICBMs and, to a lesser extent, SLBMs are not the most likely form of attack. A space-based system DOES, however, provide a focussed developmental environment for a huge number of technologies that would be very helpful for any kind of strategic interception.
Don't forget, the race to put a man on the moon didn't yield any direct economic profit (we're not selling lunar masonry products, for example) nor does basic research.
Yeah, well, the computer chip in your car would make the engine blow up while you're driving at high speed on a crowded road. THE FUCKING ROAD!!! A traffic signal could go wrong and you could get in an accident. A FUCKING ACCIDENT!!! The guidance system on an airplane could have a glitch and you crash. A FUCKING AIRPLANE!!! The registers in the supermarket use lasers to determine your bill. FUCKING LASER BEAMS!!!
There is no reference, whatsoever, that says anything about uncompressed video.
DV is about 13G/hour and the compression is through hardware. The unit probably uses that format and has a software codec.
The article doesn't say if this unit has a tape mechanism and the picture doesn't look like there is one. If it's only using the HD, no, 30G is not enough. You could work on 1 hour at most.
This is just a geek toy to try to impress the other geek in the next cubicle. It's not beefy enough or powerful enough to do any real work. It's also too awkward to use as a camcorder. Might be fine for shooting a few seconds at a time or recording part of a meeting but that's about it.
Well, even better, sounds like this guy has a DirecTiVo. Use it's guide to do your scheudling then use the "record to tape" to pipe a stored stream out.
I didn't pre-emptively answer any conceivable question someone could ask. I provided a link to the best general hacking site for TiVos. If you had actually gone there and run a search, you would have found the mp3 project for TiVos.
I didn't mention mplayer, integrated DVD burners, on-TiVo stream editing, or any of a number of other projects, either.
Slashdot Mirror
In response to some of the responses ;)
Items and a retail box which holds them aren't permanently linked. Many items are produced and shipped then put inside a box. Granted, a lot of the stuff coming to the US from Asia is already in a box. But a tag on the box only allows validation of the box, not the contents. About a month ago I ordered some stuff from OfficeMax and the CDRW drive was not in the delivery box. They claim it left their shipping depot. Well, it wasn't in the box, which was partially crushed, btw. How long did it take me to get this straightened out? 3 weeks and about 2 hours on the phone. How does "personal integrity" stop this from happening?
The simple fact is there is a huge amount of problem with items that disappear or aren't where they should be.
This notion that somehow someone is going to build a system to monitor everything every Joe Blow does is monstrously naive. The computing power and infrastructure requirement to accomplish that is nigh impossible. People who make these kinds of claims have probably never done any real transaction modeling. If they had, they'd quickly understand just how much "data" would truly need to be gathered, stored and analyzed.
Want some real world examples of how this affects pricing? OK, the rep from General Mills walks down the cereal isle at your grocery store and can instantly tell how many boxes of whatever are there. She then walks through the storage area. Inventory is done. You can't do that with a bar code, it requires unique ids which are remotely sensed.
Expand that scenario to every product in every store. The cost/time savings of inventory recording/analysis/planning are incredible. Fact of the matter is the economy of the world has made American employees almost too expensive. Costs have to be cut somewhere. It's either people or process.
Personal integrity is not the absolute answer. That was a silly comment and really more flamebait than discussion. The answer is obvious, if you don't want non-invasive ability to identify actual items, instead of boxes, you have a choice: embedded id tags or much higher cost. Higher cost means higher price.
Complaining about this is about the same as the ridiculousness that surrounded grocery stores using bar codes or that stupidity on the West Coast where the $150K+ year shoremen refused to offbear shipping containers which had what? Oh, remotely-sensed IDs and very simple barcoding. Why did they refuse this? To keep their $150K+ jobs moving crates on the docks. In essence, they were more interested in protecting their own personal profit based on an antiquated process than the big picture. All those $150K/yera doc workers mean more money you have to pay for goods.
Complaining about RFID is the same thing. In the end, nobody is going to care about paranoid fantasies. They want goods available at a low price, period. RFID and other non-invasive ID technologies will decrease cost and increase quality of the dsitribution process.
Oh, and this idea that someone is going to track you? C'mon, 300 million people moving through the U.S. each generating potentially millions of transactions (from a modeling standpoint, any time you move through a door, start a car, do any activity...) That's a SciFi movie. The vast majority of us aren't THAT important.
(just in case someone catches my userid, yes, I'm not in the service now, now I'm in sales.)
I've been selling manufacturing equipment for boxes for about 6 years.
RFID tags have many, many uses in warehousing. The idea that an RFID will somehow automatically lead to an invasion of privacy is silly.
Sometimes RFID tags are used so the forklift operator knows what's on a pallet they're moving. The traditional way is to hang a piece of paper from the load. However, paper can and does fall off, get ripped, etc.
RFID can also be used on physical portals to measure traffic. A huge amount of savings can be made in a warehouse by knowing where the physical bottlenecks are. The most cost-effective and reliable way to do this is a system of non-invasive sensing and automatic data collection. Ever been in warehousing operations? There's a LOT going on and it's easy to lose stuff. I've had trouble finding a shipment at a customs depot that was only garage-sized. Everything is a different size, shape, and appearance.
Will the FUD never stop?
Ever buy something like a power tool, CD, or memory strip from a retailer? There's an inventory control strip in there, right? Duh.
Beyond that, do some investigation to the problems of bar codes. Betcha didn't know there's a very limited number of options there which are basically exhausted. Ever consider the sensing difference between barcodes and RFID? Hmm...maybe you could know what something is and what's INSIDE without having to physically touch the box.
Yes, I know there are barcode readers that work at a distance. They don't work THROUGH other boxes. How do you know what's inside a mixed pallet of boxes which is sealed with plastic wrap? How better to detect a discrepancy between shipping documents and the actual items than by non-invasively knowing AND COUNTING what's inside such a mixed pallet?
RFID and other non-invasive knowledge technologies don't automatically mean you are being spied on. It's far more likely a way to increase efficiency and lower costs. We DO live in a price-competitive society, don't we?
As far as the reply about tracking what you buy. Uh...ever hear of credit cards and so-called discount cards at retailers?
They also spend a lot of time looking at their shoes, don't they?
Where are YOU getting your information?
Impersonate Air Force officers? Why would they do that when there are so many assigned to them?
A common misconception is that the NSA buys/evaluates software the same way Joe Blow does.
I've been there and written code. Got a joint service commendation medal for software work for nuke command & control. The review process for critical code is excruciating.
This article is a lot of FUD.
Did you notice they don't make ANY claim whatsoever about what TYPE of software development? Hmmmm...that's interesting.
It's always possible espionage can happen. Having said that, there's a LOT that goes on at the NSA. Look at the publicly available pictures of the headquarters building. Ever wonder what it takes to feed and supply people and keep it clean?
There are different levels of software oversight, just as in the "outside" world. Yes, IRTA, and all I see is what looks like someone who was outside the loop making FUD statements about what's inside the loop.
Did you notice this doofus hasn't been on the job that long? Did you notice he was "alarmed" that the names of people were available? Well, duh!!
If you need to contact someone because you're contractually obligated to them, don't you need to know who they are and how to reach them? My family could pick up the phone and call me at work anytime they wanted and they met a lot of the people I worked with. This guy has watched too much TV. How does he think contrators communicate with the NSA? Trap doors and dead drops?
FWIW, I've never used or owned a shoe phone. Nor did we talk under a cone of silence.
Personally, I like "Alias" but let's get real, everyone doesn't sneak around through hidden doors with code names.
To my eyes, this guy didn't have access to much of anything. Maybe he wanted to get into the secure side of the development and was refused. Hmmm..ya think?
A flat cylinder, now there's a unique concept ;)
*pssst* (yeah, you, who thinks you know what you're talking about...) You don't have an integrated TiVo, do you?
I've got a whoel room ful of video processing equipment. Even so, there is a big differecne between getting access to the stored satellite stream on an integrated TiVo's hard drives and using pro-level digitizing equipment on the video-out connectors on a TiVo, even with the S-Video connector.
For an integrated TiVo, what you propose includes one D/A-A/D sequence, for a standalone TiVo with no digital feed, there are 2 of those sequences.
If you want quality, you don't use analog cables. If you want to quickly burn DVD or SVCD, you get rid of the analog steps.
A "pig in a poke" means a bag with a piglet in it, the traditional way of selling a piglet because it's a lot easier to carry that way.
"Letting the cat out of the bag" refers to the other traditional way of selling a "pig in a poke" that is really a cat. The purchaser isn't expected to look inside the bag until they've gotten home out of the risk the piglet will escape. When they do look, they find out the truth.
So...Microsoft DID NOT buy a pig in a poke.
Why should the RIAA check their "sources"? They're making a lot of money/press by blackmail and coercion.
Just a matter of time before they pick on the wrong people.
It would be interesting to see how many time the RIAA systems access servers with restricted use policies: "Ve haf found der pirate!!!!" "No, you've trespassed on the private server of esquires Anastacia Lopez and Santana Aguilera of the law firm that prosecuted the tobacco settlement. Pay up."
Please drop me a note.
I'm the "keeper" of links on Donald's site.
There are a few new projects and I'd like to ask your help.
a reall 100% live, breathing FEMALE lawyer on /. would get a more communication than legal questions.
She'd turn into a geek cubicle pinup queen.
Here's a good example of what can be done to clean up video.
http://konstant.web1000.com/SpotRemoved.avi
Imagine how this could get rid of dropouts. I guess it's all a question of what you want to do. If you want QND, don't process. If the image is something you really want high quality, process properly.
wrt the comment somebody else made about capturing at 640x480:
;)
video pixels are not square and 640x480 has no proper reationship to VHS resolutions. Capture at 720x480 and downsize. You're trying to fit a curve which means you want to sample at a multitude of the initial frequency then downsize to a proper video size.
640x480 would mean a distortion during the sample then a distortion when you change the size to be standards-compliant.
Then again, you could also get in a time machine and go beat some sense into the farmboy who invented TV so it would match computer resolutions and be progressive....But I digress
miniDV is a horrible option. Anyone who suggests that hasn't really worked with the format much. It's great for camcorders but not archival of this volume.
You DO need a good deck. I use an upper-end JVC S-VHS deck with integrated comb, genlock, and digital buffer to stabilize. The importance of a clean incoming signal CANNOT be overstated. Garbage in, garbage out and bandwidth wasted. S-Video is important because it delivers a far higher quality image. Composite video mushes parts of the signal together.
For the bulk of my straight archival I use an Athlon-based system with USB2 connected to an ADS USB Instant DVD MPEG-2 encoder and an iMic USB sounde device.
USB2 is important because you need lots of available bandwidth. The iMic uses the same AD/DA chip as some of teh pro Roland devices. Doing the sound grab outside the computer's case helps cut down on noise. (Yes, I use a USB extension and the iMic is "housed" near the VCR.
Some people prefer the Snazzi USB encoders. I found the ADS, factory refurbished, at TigerDirect for $150. hard to find a hardware capture at that price.
I've also got a Canon DV camcorder with passthrough and an ATi All-in-Wonder. Neither is a good solution. DV is HUGE compared to the quality of the source and any cheap capture card has poor performance. If you want to spend $1K for a Canopus, well, that's a different story...
For plain-vanilla VHS and S-VHS you're going to be just fine if you use CVD which is half DVD resolution and is compatible with the DVD spec.
Which leads to storage medium. You can burn CVDs to CDR if you want. It's cheap because, at least in the U.S., you can find CDRs for full rebate a lot and the drives also. Right now, if you're lucky, you'll find both at OfficeMax.com. Alternately, got to DVD.
Now, a word about bitrates: Your comment that a DVD can't hold 2 hours is incorrect. Sounds like you tried and captured at too high a data rate for your source.
If you're willing to re-compress, you can easily use various clean-up filters and get at least as good an image as you have on tape, putting 3.5-4 hours per disc in CVD format on a DVDR. That's not a typo. If you properly use filters the result of cleanup on onld VHS source can be better than the raw version. There are filters specifically to deal with the various colorswim and dropouts of magnetic tape.
For a list of links and info on hacking the ADS capture device:
utils@mindspring.com
A/V Utils for the Masses!!!
Curator of links at
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/
For info on the iMic:
http://griffintechnology.com
yoru first comment, I can't be too direct about this but I'll try to explain with an example you can test yourself. Some ATM machines have a time delay mechanism when they eject the user's card. If the card sits in the reader too long, it is pulled back in and the account locked until a bank person resets everything. That's an example of hardware enforcing procedure. Initiating a national asset weapons includes a series of steps, personal actions and hardware requirements that must be done in a specific order for it to work.
Uh...which generation of Pattiot? Do you know what it was originally designed to do? Scud-busting was an admitted quick hack.
The current generation, used in Iraq the past month, did do what it was supposed to. The jets it knocked down failed IFF interrogation so that makes them targets.
wrt, falling debris. Well, duh. Why wouldn't that exist and have a potential to create soem kind of damage? If something's in the air and it blows up, pieces fall down. That's true of everything. Heck, I shot a duck once and shot came back to Earth, so did the dead duck.
The assumption that "SDI" is only effective during what is considered a boost phase only makes sense if you think it's impossible to detect/track/target/destroy MIRVs. As far as being more difficult to destroy during the re-entry phase, why? Wouldn't they be generating a lot of heat? Might be easier to detect then?
Why assume a missile would be an alley-oop, over the top lob and not a low-flying cruise?
wrt test firings of ICBMs, sure LAUNCH was tested under very controlled conditions. Those only flew a short distance, were unarmed, and flew west from the California coast. Find a map that shows magnetic anomalies. AFAIK, none have been fired over the North Pole. That's a heck of a lot different than crews in the field knowing they have real weapons and the only launch orders that come in that environment are real. So...they haven't been "tested" as much, in that regard, as you might think.
SDI, the term, is a little outdated and if you try to limit it to 20-year-old concepts and technologies, you'll be misleading yourself.
Everything about the moon program was NOT civilian and was NOT publicly available. It still isn't.
There were some intercepts that were faked during the Reagan era. Heck of a payoff those had, huh? Soviet Union collapsed because they knew they couldn't compete. In that regard, the system WAS successful. (Sun Tzu: the goal is to get the enemy to surrender without having to fight...) Same with those $600 toilet seats. ("Komrade, they have these huge money scandals and still completely outclass us, we can't compete.")
I'm not excusing graft, just trying to illustrate a point.
Lots of things were screwed up on the Bradley project, too. (There's a really cool movie about that, forget the name.) As I recall, the M-16 was also a real mess at first.
Your conclusion has a number of statements for which you have no validation. It's based on a hypothetical future condition so, by definition, there's no way to state what the outcome will be. history has shown the exact opposite of what you claim to be true. Surface mount electronics, GPS, fiber optics, etc., etc., etc. all come from technologies the military needed. Why would anything based in space be different?
FWIW, and I know this will irk anyone who has a dogmatic hatred of the military, the first real historic use machining tools and practices was to make uniform firearms. Everything came from that. So, basically, all the quality controla nd manufacturing processes we use, outside hand operations, trace their roots to military needs.
Let's ignore the sarcasm that comes from ignorance and deal with the actual question that is buried somewhere inside it.
;) My grandfather was the civilian head of contracting at Oak Ridge during WWII and he wouldn't talk about anything before he died. Even to me, which was frustrating, I'd been doing CoS-level stuff and really wanted to know about the history.)
If you're going to design something, you need to know how it is to be used. Operational experience of national asset weapons is limited to a very small subset of military officers. All I can really say is that development of operational issues and equipment for nationlal asset weaponry is controlled by veteran handlers. (FWIW, there is no such thing as a lifetime no-talk commitment, it's 70 years from last point of access, I've still got a few years to go
There have been quite a few astronauts with highly advanced engineering degrees. Maybe some have helped with thruster design. I don't know about that
By the illogic you use here, there would be NO feedback loop in design of any sort and all users is incapable of design.
Missileers have one, or very rarely, 2 tours as launch officers then go into other areas. Some stay in related roles like code handling, etc. It's not exactly the kind of experience that can be carried outside the realm you've learned it in.
Nope, American astronauts dies on the launchpad.
LOTS of Cosmonauts also died.
Sigh...ok...here's how I know.
I've been a missile launch officer and worked on design of these systems while stationed at an agency that Hollywood seems to think is a bunch of hotshot secret agents performing martial arts moves Bruce Lee couldn't have perfected.
The 6 sigma (or whatever it is) analysis that goes into Space Shuttle stuff doesn't compare to the level of analysis/oversight for these types of systems.
Major weapons systems include, at least in the U.S. military, design elements commonly referred to as positive control and assurance. Well, similar terms depending on the weapons system.
These are to make sure the people/systems issuing a comand are the proper ones and also that what is commanded happens.
There are so many layers of hardware and procedure involving split knowledge, time-sensitive authorization, and configuration compliance that it is nigh impossible for any major system to be activated improperly or on a whim.
A LOT of thought and attention goes into these systems. Real Genius, War Games, Top Gun, Spies Like Us, etc. were fictional movies. Those don't represent the way things really are any more than Alias shows what the CIA and NSA are really like.
Sub-systems are tested for everything, just as they are for other major endeavors like a new car design.
There certainly comes a time of first use for any system. ALL our weapons systems are thoroughly tested before they're actually used. The missiles whose keys I controlled as a laungh officer were the same type that were test-launched from Vandenberg AFB a number of times. Had we ever launched one directly at some Soviet base to see if it would really work? No. Does that mean it wouldn't? No.
The basic premise that because something hasn't been done it is inherently impossible to predict what will happen just doesn't make sense. Every day the overwhelming majority of things you do have never happened before in the histoyr of human existance. (You've never put that pen to that piece of paper in exactly that manner, etc.)
Having said all of that, I agree that ICBMs and, to a lesser extent, SLBMs are not the most likely form of attack. A space-based system DOES, however, provide a focussed developmental environment for a huge number of technologies that would be very helpful for any kind of strategic interception.
Don't forget, the race to put a man on the moon didn't yield any direct economic profit (we're not selling lunar masonry products, for example) nor does basic research.
Yeah, well, the computer chip in your car would make the engine blow up while you're driving at high speed on a crowded road. THE FUCKING ROAD!!! A traffic signal could go wrong and you could get in an accident. A FUCKING ACCIDENT!!! The guidance system on an airplane could have a glitch and you crash. A FUCKING AIRPLANE!!! The registers in the supermarket use lasers to determine your bill. FUCKING LASER BEAMS!!!
You're being FUCKING STUPID!!!
There is no reference, whatsoever, that says anything about uncompressed video.
DV is about 13G/hour and the compression is through hardware. The unit probably uses that format and has a software codec.
The article doesn't say if this unit has a tape mechanism and the picture doesn't look like there is one. If it's only using the HD, no, 30G is not enough. You could work on 1 hour at most.
This is just a geek toy to try to impress the other geek in the next cubicle. It's not beefy enough or powerful enough to do any real work. It's also too awkward to use as a camcorder. Might be fine for shooting a few seconds at a time or recording part of a meeting but that's about it.
Well, even better, sounds like this guy has a DirecTiVo. Use it's guide to do your scheudling then use the "record to tape" to pipe a stored stream out.
He really did put together a Rube Goldberg mess.
I didn't pre-emptively answer any conceivable question someone could ask. I provided a link to the best general hacking site for TiVos. If you had actually gone there and run a search, you would have found the mp3 project for TiVos.
I didn't mention mplayer, integrated DVD burners, on-TiVo stream editing, or any of a number of other projects, either.
...then I won't reward your laziness with an answer.
yes and yes
I still think, as do most people who hang out on the forums, that you should pay the service fee. Without it, the guide data will go away.
Poke around DealDatabase's forum.
If you're too lazy to use the SEARCH function at the forum whose URL I've provided...