Actually I'd say the AGR design is the best about in terms of conversion ratio, it's the most efficient out there, unfortunately it's much like Concorde in that sense, it's very technically advanced but consequently very complex (plumbers field day) so PWR wins out for simplicity and cost reasons.
The Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross went on a tour of the Torness AGR on the Scottish coast, a very interesting read. They'll probably never offer tours like that again post 9/11.
I've noticed quite a few cash points at HSBC have been switched over to Windows, they look very pretty compared to the old text menus but they're also really slow, taking much more time than the previous OS/2 installed base.
They also don't ask if you need a follow-up service once you've made a selection:/
If WM9 can't even compete with MPEG4 LC, which is relatively established now, it will get eaten alive by AVC/H.264, not that MPEG-LA help themselves by encumbering a promising technology with patent and royalty complexities, by the time they get a satisfactory resolution they hand people like MS time to bribe and cajole a less worthy codec onto hapless consumers, and eventually studios of course.
MS is like my dog, who I've nick-named monopoly, he was promisng to start with then he jumps up to bite me in the ass given any excuse. He eats all the food out there and demands more resources, not to mention his lack of standards cause bad conflictions with other four legged beasts (such as the beast).
I'd say this is way to pessimistic, a lot of government money is washing into technology, which may not be good for the long-term considering the healthiness of most state supported industries.
He mises one crucial point, the backbone, this posting for instance isn't going to magically bounce from the middle of the UK to Exodus(?) by 802.11 alone, as illustrated by the recent crackdownby cableco's on publicly listed access points they're reluctant to support an essentially public network that runs contrary to their business model, and transcending the traditional backbone requires organisation and capital, something absent from P2P systems.
A concern is the finite amount of spectrum available in regards to the scalability of P2P wireless systems, as the number of users increases so does the baseload just to maintain the system, some clever managed routing will be required along with a wired backbone between nodes, if you use daisy chain style off-air repeating between nodes you quickly deplete spectrum and diminish the benefit of local frequency replication, basically the "everyone shouting in a crowded room" scenario.
"Distance decay" is a feature of the traditional phone network yet on the net people no longer communicate on the basis of geography, did that Wired article come from a server in Silicon Valley, New York, London? Does it matter, I don't particularly care, I'm just interested in the content. However the "lily pads and frogs" architecture is deeply tied to locality, it's easy to communicate with local nodes but it progressively gets more difficult the farther you go, again this leads us back to the backbone problem.
Another issue is misuse, free wireless reminds me of the net of yester year, you could for instance use SMTP servers all over the globe and the vast majority of users didn't abuse that facility, but obviously the small majority of spammers swiftly made that a thing of the past and continue to annoy us today, how would open wireless networks be anydifferent? Control is needed, which leads back to structure and capital.
Call me a pessimist, but it's not quite as rosy as he makes out.
Not quite, there is no set format, DVD-A like DVD video is capable of using 6 channel 24bit/96kHz or 192kHz/24-bit 2 channel PCM streams, AC3, DTS, MPEG1/2 Layer II multichannel.
Some guys in Germany are working on a software decoder for DRM, this is basically a new digital radio service for SW/LW/MW radio, there's a few test transmitters running in Europe. The transmissions consist of a COFDM modulated channel and a 20-30kbps AAC stream within, doesn't sound like much but when you can get flawless delivery from Finland to Portugal and farther afield it's not bad and makes old SW look very poor indeed.
No... it was because streetlights acted as transmitters for the signals and killed various parts of the spectrum with noise, namely police and ham frequencies.
"It seems the BT has forced prodigies hand, and thus forced a court case. as a side note, I thought BT had the British patent offices seal of approval, as it were?"
Margaret Thatcher was in the process of severing various companies during 1980's so I'm not sure the relationship would be that great. But the circumstances surrounding the British patent are totally arbitrary anyway, it is the US patent that is being contested in court not the British patent (which has expired anyway).
It's not a British patent it's a US patent issued by the USPTO for a foreign company, very different thing. If it was falsely issued then it's the responsibility of the USPTO not the UK Patent Office.
"British patents can be very vague, compared to US patents"
First of all, this is a US patent not a British one, it was patented with the USPTO, it doesn't matter if the company filing the patent is foreign... the patent laws from that foreign country doesn't suddenly transcend into the US law. If the USPTO believed it to be too vague then they simply should have rejected it, the UK patent has expired and is incidental.
To say US patents are not vague is laughable, in the US you can even patent totally intangible things such as 'business processes', you should check some of those, if they're not vague and over reaching then I don't know what is. Then we have patentable "mathematical algorithms" (even if they're not practically applied), they don't stand for such things in the UK patent office that's why RSA, LZW never received patents in the UK.
The 1962 paper is interesting, which incidentally wasn't published until 1964, people generally go by the date of publication not when they inked the first paragraph. Surprsingly the above paper doesn't mention the word 'packet' once, which is a bit of a contradiction if you claim to have invented 'packet switching'.
The first instance of "Packet" and '"acket Switching" was in Davies' 1967 paper "A digital Communications Network for Computers", which was presented at a conference in Tennessee, at the same conference Lawrence Roberts of ARPA presented a design for creating a computer network. He had also made presentations before ARPA a year before on the concepts of 'packet switching'.
I have, Donald Davies is usually ignored or maligned, he died in 2000 so you can't argue with a dead man, that's why I find the article somewhat nauseating.
Donald Davies is largely acknowledged for developing Packet Switching (and even coining that very phrase) at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, however he was not American so he's largely ignored.
The Brits had them too... they layed mines and high explosives directly below ships and made a quick get away, they blew up a load of Japanese ships in Singapore habour during WW2.
"Telewest in the UK let you use up to 5 MAC numbers anyway. Maybe they meant only one at a time."
Got it in one, they only let you use a single MAC at one time, the rest are simply there as reserves.
"The Surfboard cablemodem iteslf reports it can act as a gateway for 32 machines."
That's not NAT thought, the modem is simply a router, Telewest would need to issue your account with 32 public IP addresses to serve that number of machines. Telewest leave you no choice but to use NAT since they wont lease you anymore public IP addresses on the residential package. Besides... if I'm using my modem directly or though another Linux box then what difference does it make to them?
This always was the case in the UK, cableco's have been providing telephony services before the net came along:-
DigitalTV & Phone = £25
Cable Modem = £25
Second Line = £5
My average phone bill = £20
Total = £75 (~$110 USD)
Then you have PPV on top of that if required. The competition like BT charge around £40 ($55) just for ADSL, they completely shaft people but they need the cash to fund their spurious patent claims.
Anyway, you can see why companies love subscriptions, I can't wait until I have to rent all my music!
Lol, funny you should say that, the BBC do actually have a hand in crafting the MPEG Layer II and III formats believe it or not!
It all started in the late 80's when they were finalising the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB/Digital Radio) spec with the Eureka 147 Consortium, the group responsable for developing the Digital Radio spec.
Anyway they had solved the problem of creating a digital distribution network but the problem was a PCM channel took up the entire multiplex, so Fraunhofer started to develop a perceptual audio codec that would compress the audio and allow many stations in the same multiplex, and so the MPEG audio layers were born. Then the popular growth of the Internet came along, added to the source code available on the Fraunhofer FTP and the rest is history, unfortunately, so are the record companies:)
If you want to listen over the net make sure you listen to the Ogg stream because it's higher quality than their Real streams, and Linux friendly.
As a nice Christmas gesture the BBC cut the bitrates down across the board on their terrestrial Digital Radio (DAB) service a couple of days ago, LoTR's will be on Radio 4 which is often found at 80kbps Mono MP2 now, instead of 192kbps stereo, the FM signal is now of superior quality.
A note to all those people who are interested in buying a DAB tuner (all 3 of you!), don't bother, unless they resurrect the bitrates you might as well just get a decent FM tuner, the quality will be better. Another decent technology ruined.
Not necessarily so, they are a blunt tool, if I'm working on an Open Source PVR project, whether it's commercial or not they could wield their patents against me. We've seen it before in terms of MP3 licensing groups on behalf of Fraunhofer, Unisys with LZW licensing for GIF, Dolby threatening an AC3 decoder developer (just the decoder, not encoder), then there's all the Apple TrueType patents hanging over Freetype, non of the above projects are commercial yet they are threatened.
Hrm... lets see, I have an anologue Hauppauge controller, PC, and DivX encoder and Hauppauge DVB-s card that can pipe the MPEG2 transport stream to disk, the software to tie it all together, will they be suing me next?
Let's face it, it's just rudimentary off the shelf hardware put in a different box, if someone decides to make a PC that looks like a funky box will be get sued too? Based on the hardware the patent seems unsubstantiated, looking at the software it looks unsubstantiated, I bet TiVO even use the Video For Linux API.
"I wasn't claiming that they were rioting in the streets, but everyone I knew always had a grumble about it."
It pales in significance compared to the grumble I have everytime I see my National Insurance and income tax deductions, don't get me wrong, nobody likes paying taxes but that's how society functions. Unfortunately, I can readily waste $160 on absolute crap so the licence probably does me a favour:)
I agree, XM isn't comparable the BBC, the BBC is a non-profit public service with commitments plainly set out in its charter, XM is a commercial company whose aim is to extract money from its subscribers for the benefit of its shareholders, and like any commercial company, quite rightly too.
There's no guarantee they won't pack their content full of adverts and cut budgets on content production once a certain critical mass of subscribers has been achieved, which is basically the magazine model. It may get the the stage where, apart from countrywide availability, it's no better than tradition commercial radio yet you also have the privilege of paying for it.
With SkyTV (Murdoch owned)in UK you pay a handsome subscription fee yet they also have the audacity to run adverts, not excessively so, but it's not really fair play. It's not really a good path to go down, considering they could have you by the short and curlies in a few years, if they don't already.
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Actually I'd say the AGR design is the best about in terms of conversion ratio, it's the most efficient out there, unfortunately it's much like Concorde in that sense, it's very technically advanced but consequently very complex (plumbers field day) so PWR wins out for simplicity and cost reasons.
The Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross went on a tour of the Torness AGR on the Scottish coast, a very interesting read. They'll probably never offer tours like that again post 9/11.
I've noticed quite a few cash points at HSBC have been switched over to Windows, they look very pretty compared to the old text menus but they're also really slow, taking much more time than the previous OS/2 installed base.
:/
They also don't ask if you need a follow-up service once you've made a selection
The article is somewhat brief, especially compared to the original story, you can watch the TV report on the Newsnight pages.
If WM9 can't even compete with MPEG4 LC, which is relatively established now, it will get eaten alive by AVC/H.264, not that MPEG-LA help themselves by encumbering a promising technology with patent and royalty complexities, by the time they get a satisfactory resolution they hand people like MS time to bribe and cajole a less worthy codec onto hapless consumers, and eventually studios of course.
MS is like my dog, who I've nick-named monopoly, he was promisng to start with then he jumps up to bite me in the ass given any excuse. He eats all the food out there and demands more resources, not to mention his lack of standards cause bad conflictions with other four legged beasts (such as the beast).
I'd say this is way to pessimistic, a lot of government money is washing into technology, which may not be good for the long-term considering the healthiness of most state supported industries.
He mises one crucial point, the backbone, this posting for instance isn't going to magically bounce from the middle of the UK to Exodus(?) by 802.11 alone, as illustrated by the recent crackdownby cableco's on publicly listed access points they're reluctant to support an essentially public network that runs contrary to their business model, and transcending the traditional backbone requires organisation and capital, something absent from P2P systems.
A concern is the finite amount of spectrum available in regards to the scalability of P2P wireless systems, as the number of users increases so does the baseload just to maintain the system, some clever managed routing will be required along with a wired backbone between nodes, if you use daisy chain style off-air repeating between nodes you quickly deplete spectrum and diminish the benefit of local frequency replication, basically the "everyone shouting in a crowded room" scenario.
"Distance decay" is a feature of the traditional phone network yet on the net people no longer communicate on the basis of geography, did that Wired article come from a server in Silicon Valley, New York, London? Does it matter, I don't particularly care, I'm just interested in the content. However the "lily pads and frogs" architecture is deeply tied to locality, it's easy to communicate with local nodes but it progressively gets more difficult the farther you go, again this leads us back to the backbone problem.
Another issue is misuse, free wireless reminds me of the net of yester year, you could for instance use SMTP servers all over the globe and the vast majority of users didn't abuse that facility, but obviously the small majority of spammers swiftly made that a thing of the past and continue to annoy us today, how would open wireless networks be any different? Control is needed, which leads back to structure and capital.
Call me a pessimist, but it's not quite as rosy as he makes out.
Not quite, there is no set format, DVD-A like DVD video is capable of using 6 channel 24bit/96kHz or 192kHz/24-bit 2 channel PCM streams, AC3, DTS, MPEG1/2 Layer II multichannel.
Some guys in Germany are working on a software decoder for DRM, this is basically a new digital radio service for SW/LW/MW radio, there's a few test transmitters running in Europe. The transmissions consist of a COFDM modulated channel and a 20-30kbps AAC stream within, doesn't sound like much but when you can get flawless delivery from Finland to Portugal and farther afield it's not bad and makes old SW look very poor indeed.
I always wondered where that £4 billion profit from the ERM crisis was being spent :)
No... it was because streetlights acted as transmitters for the signals and killed various parts of the spectrum with noise, namely police and ham frequencies.
It's not a British patent it's a US patent issued by the USPTO for a foreign company, very different thing. If it was falsely issued then it's the responsibility of the USPTO not the UK Patent Office.
To say US patents are not vague is laughable, in the US you can even patent totally intangible things such as 'business processes', you should check some of those, if they're not vague and over reaching then I don't know what is. Then we have patentable "mathematical algorithms" (even if they're not practically applied), they don't stand for such things in the UK patent office that's why RSA, LZW never received patents in the UK.
The 1962 paper is interesting, which incidentally wasn't published until 1964, people generally go by the date of publication not when they inked the first paragraph. Surprsingly the above paper doesn't mention the word 'packet' once, which is a bit of a contradiction if you claim to have invented 'packet switching'.
The first instance of "Packet" and '"acket Switching" was in Davies' 1967 paper "A digital Communications Network for Computers", which was presented at a conference in Tennessee, at the same conference Lawrence Roberts of ARPA presented a design for creating a computer network. He had also made presentations before ARPA a year before on the concepts of 'packet switching'.
I have, Donald Davies is usually ignored or maligned, he died in 2000 so you can't argue with a dead man, that's why I find the article somewhat nauseating.
Donald Davies is largely acknowledged for developing Packet Switching (and even coining that very phrase) at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, however he was not American so he's largely ignored.
The Brits had them too... they layed mines and high explosives directly below ships and made a quick get away, they blew up a load of Japanese ships in Singapore habour during WW2.
Err... 26 million households @ £109 a year.
That's not NAT thought, the modem is simply a router, Telewest would need to issue your account with 32 public IP addresses to serve that number of machines. Telewest leave you no choice but to use NAT since they wont lease you anymore public IP addresses on the residential package. Besides... if I'm using my modem directly or though another Linux box then what difference does it make to them?
This always was the case in the UK, cableco's have been providing telephony services before the net came along :-
DigitalTV & Phone = £25
Cable Modem = £25
Second Line = £5
My average phone bill = £20
Total = £75 (~$110 USD)
Then you have PPV on top of that if required. The competition like BT charge around £40 ($55) just for ADSL, they completely shaft people but they need the cash to fund their spurious patent claims.
Anyway, you can see why companies love subscriptions, I can't wait until I have to rent all my music!
Indeed they are, Linux Planet did an article on the BBC many moons ago.
Lol, funny you should say that, the BBC do actually have a hand in crafting the MPEG Layer II and III formats believe it or not!
:)
It all started in the late 80's when they were finalising the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB/Digital Radio) spec with the Eureka 147 Consortium, the group responsable for developing the Digital Radio spec.
Anyway they had solved the problem of creating a digital distribution network but the problem was a PCM channel took up the entire multiplex, so Fraunhofer started to develop a perceptual audio codec that would compress the audio and allow many stations in the same multiplex, and so the MPEG audio layers were born. Then the popular growth of the Internet came along, added to the source code available on the Fraunhofer FTP and the rest is history, unfortunately, so are the record companies
The RIAA have a lot to thank BBC R&D for.
If you want to listen over the net make sure you listen to the Ogg stream because it's higher quality than their Real streams, and Linux friendly.
As a nice Christmas gesture the BBC cut the bitrates down across the board on their terrestrial Digital Radio (DAB) service a couple of days ago, LoTR's will be on Radio 4 which is often found at 80kbps Mono MP2 now, instead of 192kbps stereo, the FM signal is now of superior quality.
A note to all those people who are interested in buying a DAB tuner (all 3 of you!), don't bother, unless they resurrect the bitrates you might as well just get a decent FM tuner, the quality will be better. Another decent technology ruined.
Not necessarily so, they are a blunt tool, if I'm working on an Open Source PVR project, whether it's commercial or not they could wield their patents against me. We've seen it before in terms of MP3 licensing groups on behalf of Fraunhofer, Unisys with LZW licensing for GIF, Dolby threatening an AC3 decoder developer (just the decoder, not encoder), then there's all the Apple TrueType patents hanging over Freetype, non of the above projects are commercial yet they are threatened.
Hrm... lets see, I have an anologue Hauppauge controller, PC, and DivX encoder and Hauppauge DVB-s card that can pipe the MPEG2 transport stream to disk, the software to tie it all together, will they be suing me next?
Let's face it, it's just rudimentary off the shelf hardware put in a different box, if someone decides to make a PC that looks like a funky box will be get sued too? Based on the hardware the patent seems unsubstantiated, looking at the software it looks unsubstantiated, I bet TiVO even use the Video For Linux API.
I agree, XM isn't comparable the BBC, the BBC is a non-profit public service with commitments plainly set out in its charter, XM is a commercial company whose aim is to extract money from its subscribers for the benefit of its shareholders, and like any commercial company, quite rightly too.
There's no guarantee they won't pack their content full of adverts and cut budgets on content production once a certain critical mass of subscribers has been achieved, which is basically the magazine model. It may get the the stage where, apart from countrywide availability, it's no better than tradition commercial radio yet you also have the privilege of paying for it.
With SkyTV (Murdoch owned)in UK you pay a handsome subscription fee yet they also have the audacity to run adverts, not excessively so, but it's not really fair play. It's not really a good path to go down, considering they could have you by the short and curlies in a few years, if they don't already.