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WiFi On Two Wheels
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On the other hand walking around like he's a saint or he's bringing vittles to the starving masses makes him look like an imbecile... I mean for chrissakes, you're giving people limited wireless connectivity, in the random chance that you happen to be parked by a guy with a laptop...
"An interesting combination of wireless, wheels, and store-and-forward email: 'In Cambodia, motorbikes act as routers for a store-and-forward email system: The New York Times reports on a system that allow remote villages in Cambodia to send and receive email via Wi-Fi-equipped motorbikes. The Motoman system converges in the provincial capital where a satellite-enabled school uploads and downloads email for the remote recipients. The system is funded in part through U.S. benefactors who aren't just sending money; they're spending time there as well, and helping to improve the quality of medicine and people's livelihoods.'"
Definitely a topic that's been on Slashdot before:
I actually saw MagicBike at an art and tech show in New York last year. Spoke to Yury Gitman who was actually a pretty cool guy. MagicBike actually came before the Cambodian project and inspired quite a few others like it.
Like movies, novels, and plays before them, computer games have discovered politics. Even the pure, plot-driven action that remains often comes attached to heavily politicized back-stories.
Personally, I don't remember the time when stories existed in some magical land of pristine unaffected factual recounts of events.
There are no stories without perspective and no stories without bias of any sort. Even Asteroids has an anti-mineral bias (who's gonna think about the space rocks!?!?!). But to argue that perspective doens't belong in stories is to deny one of the reasons why we read, watch, listen, and play along with them - we want to hear other peoples' ideas about the stuff going on around us.
Games don't exist in a vacuum. Games are stories. Stories don't discover pplotics and other forms of "bias." People do (like writers.)
Anyone who wants factual data should stick to Excel spreadsheets.
Sounds like you're doing some fun stuff there. I work for MNN cable access in NYC. We just finished rebuilding our studio where we just got done dealing with these same issues. I understand joo.
1> Lighting. This is probably the most important part of making a show look good. I think I'd be doing you a disservice to say "get two inkies, three 5K fresnels, blah blah blah." You should really consider bringing in a good lighting designer who can not only recommend some good fixtures, but who can also put together some stock light plots that will look good for 95% of all productions. Never sleep on good lighting for a studio. It really makes all the difference.
2> Cameras. We went with the Hitachi Z3000W as our studio camera. It's digital, it has great resolution, and a wicked nice lens. They provide a lot of bang for the buck (can't remember how much we paid, tho.) Take a look at Triax cabling for connecting the cameras back to Control. It's flexible, the signa's clean, and they're a lot easier and cheaper to replace. For a teleprompter, we're just using QTV with WinCue. Works fine.
3> Audio. We had some Behringers around but they didn't stand up to the abuse we put it through. Then we found the Sony ECM-55B. It's our workhorse lav. I've had nothing but headaches with wireless so I'm not going to comment on them.
4> Decks. There are a ton of Good Broadcast Reasons to go with BetaSP but it's just so damn expensive. I love DV. Because we're public access, we have to work with civilians who can't afford $20 per tape. Let them master to DV at $4 a pop and they can go home, finish in iMovie or Premiere on their home computer and bring it back in to us all clean and digital like. Sure, it's compressed and of course it might artifact, but working with analog in post is a system bandwidth hassle. Meanwhile DV works at full-res on my mom's iMac. Until Thompson decides to make the Filmstream for $3K, I'm sticking with DV. I say go with DV if you can (DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, whatever.) You can't beat the price.
5> I'm not a big fan of the Streaming In A Box solutions. What you get for your streaming really depends on what you want to deliver. Do you want to provide video on demand? Bring the video into a Mac or PC via FireWire, use Discreet Cleaner to convert the file to MPEG4, Real, whatever, and drop it on a streaming server with lots of storage, hordes of RAM, and some fat ass bandwidth. Just looking to simulcast your broadcast? Even easier: run the program output of your master control switcher to a video capture card on a superfast PC. Start up some live encoder software (QuickTime Broadcaster, Helix Producer, MPEG4IP) and have it send a unicast stream to a replication server attached to the net. With live streaming, you don't need any storage at all (unless you need to archive.)
6> Newsdesks. Check out uniset. They make good looking inexpensive sets and CYC panels (for doing green screen). We've been very happy with their stuff.
One last thing: check out DVLince - an all-DV server based production workflow for under $300K. Sony just bought them to rebrand it as their own gear. It might not be exactly what you need, but it's worth checking out.
In addition, it will show how easy it is to enjoy high-quality entertainment online in ways that both protect American families and the interests of creators.
"The support for this PSA campaign throughout the entertainment industry -- from television networks to theater owners, from well-known actors to employees both in front of and behind the camera -- is truly extraordinary, and a testament to the urgency of this threat
Anybody else catch the tone of the language here? All it needs now is a al jazeera videotape of osama going: "Piracy good! Infidels bad! Aargh mateys!"
Video blogging isn't that bad of an idea. Even if you made a short 5-minute realvideo clip each day and streamed it from your standard HTTP server, it would only take up 5-10 MB of space, ISP transfer costs aside.
To me, the real problems with video blogging have to do with the nature of video (and not the problem of bandwidth.)
[1] Text is random access which means that as a reader, i can scan through someone's text blog and read it as fast or as slow as i wish, and instantly skip the parts I don't want to read. Video is linear which means that in order to consume the ideas presented, you have to scan audio, text, and images in order even if you don't want to.
[2] While it will take you ten minutes to produce a compelling text paragraph with links and some light editing before you post, It takes exponentially more time to create the equivalent video "paragraph." And adding graphics and links within a text layer of a quicktime movie is really really advanced stuff. It's not the kind of stuff I see most people doing anytime soon.
That is why I'm a lot more excited by things like the WiFi2TV project that plugs the functionality of the internet into an existing video network. Although that also presents a number of problems. We'll have to see how that one goes.
When there's a WiFi network in Washington Heights, Inwood and the "other" parts of Manhattan, let me know so I can tune in.
Yeah! Now there's a community that's underserved! But, of course, the WiFi network is a grassroots network. It only expands when someone new decides to build a node.
So i guess the real question is: why haven't you done anything to build a node in your neighborhood yet?
Our solution involves a TivoNet card as well. i spent weeks trying to get web-based scheduling to work and countless hours trying to figure out the simultaneous ingest/playout problem. It lead me to htink: why not put it in mothballs and take either the Linux PVR route or the Darwin MPEG4 server route? I'm still working on that one. Either way, I feel like my time with the TiVo has been invaluable.
By the way, i think you and i traded emails on this a year or two ago!:)
This is perfect for public access television stations. They often have 5-10 people, all needing to encode their videotapes at the same time. A multichannel encoder would be heaven!
I've been working with MNN, the public access station in New York, NY in building a cheap, open source video server out of an old TiVo. The equipment necessary to program and run television broadcast/cablecast centers is often expensive and proprietary. And unless you do web playback like indymedia or freespeechtv, you have to buy the equipment to play the game.
An open, Linux-based multi-encoder like this (accompanied by an open video server) would do wonders for the community media world!
What I personally would love to see, but know will never happen, is the recouperation of some of the cost by selling portions of map data to various salvaging companies. That money could then be used to put money -back- in taxpayers' pockets and make the project less wasteful.
Recovering costs from publicly funded projects is an interesting idea but it seems to be horribly implemented in practice. Time and time again, taxpayers pay for research, the fruits of that research are sold to private industry at bargain basement prices (in the name of recouping costs), private industry makes big profits, and meanwhile the 'recovered' money disappears into government overhead again. The US pharmaceuticals and technology sectors seem to be built on such practices.
I guess something can be said for the jobs and cash flow that sometimes result from companies formed out of public/private partnerships, but they really seem to be the exception to the rule. Besides, I'm not sure that the project is all that wasteful, anyway.
Okay, mine's an opposite situation but with the same guilt:
This summer I went on a blind date with a girl. We had some common interests but we just weren't hitting it off. Later that week I did a google search on her and found out that she was a pretty well respected artist. I read up on the artists she worked with, the school she studied at, the galleries she'd been in, and found that we had some common ground in art and new tech. The next time we went out, we had a fantastic three hour conversation about art and technology. I never told her about my google search.
So how do you soften people up to the idea? Wait a couple of months, release a low key but suggestive "article" to get the concept back in peoples' heads, then launch the offending software/hardware/schema again about a year later onto a public, now resigned to seeing the new 'feature' as inevitable. It's a standard pr tactic.
We saw it with Intel's P3 PSN fiasco, numerous webmail service privacy policy changes, and the XP activation scheme. And I'm not saying that all this is the work of evildoers, just that this is what it is.
Yes, your 80gb drive is now obsolete. It is completely unusable with your current configuration. Throw it out now. Or for more eco-friendly processing, please mail it to:
Me c/o Obsolete Hardware Dept. NY,NY 10001
We will kindly take care of any obsolete hardware you may have around your house including sub 2GHz Athlons and P4s, 64MB GeForce cards, and low capacity hard drives of 100GB or less. Do not worry about our processing fee for it will be absorbed in the premium you pay for buying the fastest neatest doodad. Click here to receive notice when we launch our innovative program for disposing of your automobile once it loses that new car smell!;-)
Also from the article: An ASCAP spokesman says "Kumbaya" isn't on its list, but "God Bless America" is.
You know, seeing the U.S. Congress struggle through a spontaneous rendition of 'God Bless America' on TV while downtown Manhattan went up in flames outside my window last September really disturbed me. the idea of ASCAP suing Congress for royalties actually gives me a strange sense of justice.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand walking around like he's a saint or he's bringing vittles to the starving masses makes him look like an imbecile... I mean for chrissakes, you're giving people limited wireless connectivity, in the random chance that you happen to be parked by a guy with a laptop...
Hmmm.... Well, rural villagers in Cambodia don't seem to be complaining about the concept.
"An interesting combination of wireless, wheels, and store-and-forward email: 'In Cambodia, motorbikes act as routers for a store-and-forward email system: The New York Times reports on a system that allow remote villages in Cambodia to send and receive email via Wi-Fi-equipped motorbikes. The Motoman system converges in the provincial capital where a satellite-enabled school uploads and downloads email for the remote recipients. The system is funded in part through U.S. benefactors who aren't just sending money; they're spending time there as well, and helping to improve the quality of medicine and people's livelihoods.'"
Definitely a topic that's been on Slashdot before:
I actually saw MagicBike at an art and tech show in New York last year. Spoke to Yury Gitman who was actually a pretty cool guy. MagicBike actually came before the Cambodian project and inspired quite a few others like it.
It lacks common sense and practicallity... Not to be condescending, but this is too much hype for something like this.
;)
At first glance, you're right. The whole thing lacks practicality. That is, until you realize that someone riffed off of the MagicBike and found an innovative and economical way to deliver internet access to rural Cambodia by strapping wifi to a bike and riding through villages twice daily like the mailman.
And all of a sudden, MagicBike seems like the work of a visionary.
Like movies, novels, and plays before them, computer games have discovered politics. Even the pure, plot-driven action that remains often comes attached to heavily politicized back-stories.
Personally, I don't remember the time when stories existed in some magical land of pristine unaffected factual recounts of events.
There are no stories without perspective and no stories without bias of any sort. Even Asteroids has an anti-mineral bias (who's gonna think about the space rocks!?!?!). But to argue that perspective doens't belong in stories is to deny one of the reasons why we read, watch, listen, and play along with them - we want to hear other peoples' ideas about the stuff going on around us.
Games don't exist in a vacuum. Games are stories. Stories don't discover pplotics and other forms of "bias." People do (like writers.)
Anyone who wants factual data should stick to Excel spreadsheets.
Oh yeah, another thing about audio: we like the Mackie D8 a lot. Really good board for the price.
Sounds like you're doing some fun stuff there. I work for MNN cable access in NYC. We just finished rebuilding our studio where we just got done dealing with these same issues. I understand joo.
1> Lighting. This is probably the most important part of making a show look good. I think I'd be doing you a disservice to say "get two inkies, three 5K fresnels, blah blah blah." You should really consider bringing in a good lighting designer who can not only recommend some good fixtures, but who can also put together some stock light plots that will look good for 95% of all productions. Never sleep on good lighting for a studio. It really makes all the difference.
2> Cameras. We went with the Hitachi Z3000W as our studio camera. It's digital, it has great resolution, and a wicked nice lens. They provide a lot of bang for the buck (can't remember how much we paid, tho.) Take a look at Triax cabling for connecting the cameras back to Control. It's flexible, the signa's clean, and they're a lot easier and cheaper to replace. For a teleprompter, we're just using QTV with WinCue. Works fine.
3> Audio. We had some Behringers around but they didn't stand up to the abuse we put it through. Then we found the Sony ECM-55B. It's our workhorse lav. I've had nothing but headaches with wireless so I'm not going to comment on them.
4> Decks. There are a ton of Good Broadcast Reasons to go with BetaSP but it's just so damn expensive. I love DV. Because we're public access, we have to work with civilians who can't afford $20 per tape. Let them master to DV at $4 a pop and they can go home, finish in iMovie or Premiere on their home computer and bring it back in to us all clean and digital like. Sure, it's compressed and of course it might artifact, but working with analog in post is a system bandwidth hassle. Meanwhile DV works at full-res on my mom's iMac. Until Thompson decides to make the Filmstream for $3K, I'm sticking with DV. I say go with DV if you can (DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, whatever.) You can't beat the price.
5> I'm not a big fan of the Streaming In A Box solutions. What you get for your streaming really depends on what you want to deliver. Do you want to provide video on demand? Bring the video into a Mac or PC via FireWire, use Discreet Cleaner to convert the file to MPEG4, Real, whatever, and drop it on a streaming server with lots of storage, hordes of RAM, and some fat ass bandwidth. Just looking to simulcast your broadcast? Even easier: run the program output of your master control switcher to a video capture card on a superfast PC. Start up some live encoder software (QuickTime Broadcaster, Helix Producer, MPEG4IP) and have it send a unicast stream to a replication server attached to the net. With live streaming, you don't need any storage at all (unless you need to archive.)
6> Newsdesks. Check out uniset. They make good looking inexpensive sets and CYC panels (for doing green screen). We've been very happy with their stuff.
One last thing: check out DVLince - an all-DV server based production workflow for under $300K. Sony just bought them to rebrand it as their own gear. It might not be exactly what you need, but it's worth checking out.
If you're in New York, you should check out magicbike.
Tangentally related...
One of my favorite events while switching channels during the recent Iraqi War:
Fox News Channel (Murdoch Inc.) says that that they have reports that Basra might be under the control of the British.
Sky News (also Murdoch Inc.) reports that Basra is under control by the British based on reports from Fox News Channel.
Fox News Channel reports that they now have confirmation that the British have control of Basra, according to a report on Sky News.
About two minutes later - after realizing the recursion - both channels rescinded the report.
In addition, it will show how easy it is to enjoy high-quality entertainment online in ways that both protect American families and the interests of creators.
"The support for this PSA campaign throughout the entertainment industry -- from television networks to theater owners, from well-known actors to employees both in front of and behind the camera -- is truly extraordinary, and a testament to the urgency of this threat
Anybody else catch the tone of the language here? All it needs now is a al jazeera videotape of osama going: "Piracy good! Infidels bad! Aargh mateys!"
Is it still possible to get enough free vendor-wear to fill your entire wardrobe?
Oh man, you just made me realize why my gf hates going out with me in public! i'm a total fucking geek!
Video blogging isn't that bad of an idea. Even if you made a short 5-minute realvideo clip each day and streamed it from your standard HTTP server, it would only take up 5-10 MB of space, ISP transfer costs aside.
To me, the real problems with video blogging have to do with the nature of video (and not the problem of bandwidth.)
[1] Text is random access which means that as a reader, i can scan through someone's text blog and read it as fast or as slow as i wish, and instantly skip the parts I don't want to read. Video is linear which means that in order to consume the ideas presented, you have to scan audio, text, and images in order even if you don't want to.
[2] While it will take you ten minutes to produce a compelling text paragraph with links and some light editing before you post, It takes exponentially more time to create the equivalent video "paragraph." And adding graphics and links within a text layer of a quicktime movie is really really advanced stuff. It's not the kind of stuff I see most people doing anytime soon.
That is why I'm a lot more excited by things like the WiFi2TV project that plugs the functionality of the internet into an existing video network. Although that also presents a number of problems. We'll have to see how that one goes.
When there's a WiFi network in Washington Heights, Inwood and the "other" parts of Manhattan, let me know so I can tune in.
Yeah! Now there's a community that's underserved! But, of course, the WiFi network is a grassroots network. It only expands when someone new decides to build a node.
So i guess the real question is: why haven't you done anything to build a node in your neighborhood yet?
Actually, I'm considering filing a patent on all slashdot stories.
;)
This way, whenever a dupe shows up like this one, i can claim infringement, show my prior art and make the story disappear as fast as it reappeared.
He is not a real slashdot reader! He is clearly a shill for SonyEricsson® trying to create grassroots buzz for the amazing new SonyEricsson P800®!!!
Is it not clear that this company has gone to considerable lengths to train it's actors to avoid detection as Ericsson spokespeople!?!
Our solution involves a TivoNet card as well. i spent weeks trying to get web-based scheduling to work and countless hours trying to figure out the simultaneous ingest/playout problem. It lead me to htink: why not put it in mothballs and take either the Linux PVR route or the Darwin MPEG4 server route? I'm still working on that one. Either way, I feel like my time with the TiVo has been invaluable.
:)
By the way, i think you and i traded emails on this a year or two ago!
This is perfect for public access television stations. They often have 5-10 people, all needing to encode their videotapes at the same time. A multichannel encoder would be heaven!
I've been working with MNN, the public access station in New York, NY in building a cheap, open source video server out of an old TiVo. The equipment necessary to program and run television broadcast/cablecast centers is often expensive and proprietary. And unless you do web playback like indymedia or freespeechtv, you have to buy the equipment to play the game.
An open, Linux-based multi-encoder like this (accompanied by an open video server) would do wonders for the community media world!
I've never heard Hoover used as a verb either.
Come to Vegas. I know plenty of girls who can run a demo for you for a small price.
Storm is not the most powerful of the X-Men, after all -- though close.
I guess I was absent the day they taught us to cite comic books as evidence of scientific veracity.
technical progression in our wiring, you cannot stop us scientist types doing it.
They say the same thing about lemmings which is why i don't find your words very reassuring.
You wanna go around rescuing people from earthquake rubble on a frikkin' scooter?
What I personally would love to see, but know will never happen, is the recouperation of some of the cost by selling portions of map data to various salvaging companies. That money could then be used to put money -back- in taxpayers' pockets and make the project less wasteful.
Recovering costs from publicly funded projects is an interesting idea but it seems to be horribly implemented in practice. Time and time again, taxpayers pay for research, the fruits of that research are sold to private industry at bargain basement prices (in the name of recouping costs), private industry makes big profits, and meanwhile the 'recovered' money disappears into government overhead again. The US pharmaceuticals and technology sectors seem to be built on such practices.
I guess something can be said for the jobs and cash flow that sometimes result from companies formed out of public/private partnerships, but they really seem to be the exception to the rule. Besides, I'm not sure that the project is all that wasteful, anyway.
Okay, mine's an opposite situation but with the same guilt:
This summer I went on a blind date with a girl. We had some common interests but we just weren't hitting it off. Later that week I did a google search on her and found out that she was a pretty well respected artist. I read up on the artists she worked with, the school she studied at, the galleries she'd been in, and found that we had some common ground in art and new tech. The next time we went out, we had a fantastic three hour conversation about art and technology. I never told her about my google search.
Is that cheating?
Remember the September story on how IBM, Sun, etc. wants servers to administer themselves? Remember how sysadmins had either lukewarm or negative reactions to it across the net?
So how do you soften people up to the idea? Wait a couple of months, release a low key but suggestive "article" to get the concept back in peoples' heads, then launch the offending software/hardware/schema again about a year later onto a public, now resigned to seeing the new 'feature' as inevitable. It's a standard pr tactic.
We saw it with Intel's P3 PSN fiasco, numerous webmail service privacy policy changes, and the XP activation scheme. And I'm not saying that all this is the work of evildoers, just that this is what it is.
Yes, your 80gb drive is now obsolete. It is completely unusable with your current configuration. Throw it out now. Or for more eco-friendly processing, please mail it to:
;-)
Me
c/o Obsolete Hardware Dept.
NY,NY 10001
We will kindly take care of any obsolete hardware you may have around your house including sub 2GHz Athlons and P4s, 64MB GeForce cards, and low capacity hard drives of 100GB or less. Do not worry about our processing fee for it will be absorbed in the premium you pay for buying the fastest neatest doodad. Click here to receive notice when we launch our innovative program for disposing of your automobile once it loses that new car smell!
Also from the article: An ASCAP spokesman says "Kumbaya" isn't on its list, but "God Bless America" is.
You know, seeing the U.S. Congress struggle through a spontaneous rendition of 'God Bless America' on TV while downtown Manhattan went up in flames outside my window last September really disturbed me. the idea of ASCAP suing Congress for royalties actually gives me a strange sense of justice.