Well generally a tax is basically for wealth redistribution or universal service provision, the TV licence isn't quite like that, you're not paying for the roads or the NHS etc, the licence pays for the BBC and that's it, call it an enforced subscription if you will.
"I honestly don't know if any TV licence goes to ITV or not"
ITV certainly have to pay dues for their broadcasting rights, I think this money goes to HM Treasury not the BBC, but it probably goes toward paying for the World Service grant in aid.
The inconsistencies you point out are valid, but considering the BBC was the first broadcaster (in the world?) if you bought a radio/tv years ago it was asumed you were buying it to watch the BBC since there was nothing else. The system dates back to the 20's and is a little archaic, but it works, since all the signals (including the digital mux) are Free-To-Air how could they serious administer a system if people could just come along and say "I only watch ITV".
For £120 it's not worth the trouble, even if you don't watch the BBC you have to remember it keeps the commercial broadcasters in check, which is why we don't have adverts every 5 minutes like some countries.
"And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now)."
I wouldn't say that, the annual ~$160 (tv) licence fee isn't exactly worth taking to the streets in protest, I'm sitting here quite happily listening to BBC Radio 1 on my digital terrestrial radio (aka DAB). The BBC have been running Digital Radio broadcasts since 1995, their R&D dept is well aknowledged. Most people are quite content, if it ain't broke and all that.
However, I'm not sure whether I'd pay for commercial radio, it would absolutely have to be a cut above the rest and carry no adverts or sponsorship (like the BBC). I heard XM is only using 64kbps datarates for its stereo service, I wouldn't fancy that. I know one company in the UK is having problems trying to persuade people to subscribe to Digital Terrestrial TV, but that's mainly because the SkyDigital people have wiped the floor with them.
And to celebrate they've just started selling DAB (Digital) Radio's for under £100, you can get one for your PC for £49, great for recording stuff in native MP2 (MPEG audio was originally created for this).
The stuff is still too expensive for mainstream though.
It's amazing how people can stare at a 60Hz boob tube for hours on end and not complain yet find a little LED flickering at 60Hz irritable:) My mate bought a 100Hz DTV then complained about the DRC-MF post processing then set it back to 50Hz:/
No... seriously, I bought some LED Christmas lights around 7-8 years ago, I just got them out the loft yesterday when I was getting the decorations out.
This reminds me of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) last January, the town sits within a valley with snow covered mountains each side, they used a high powered laser to project words onto the snowy hill above the town, you could submit messages through the web or via SMS (GSM text).
"He is not always given full credit for his contribution because Paul Baran, an American working at the Rand Corporation in California, had independently come up with the same idea. However, Baran was focusing on a way to restructure AT&T's telephone system. Davies was creating a data network, and the design of the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, was changed completely to adopt his technique.
Also, Davies's term for the idea, which he called "packet switching", was much catchier than Baran's "distributed adaptive message block switching".
When it comes to British inventors/inventions this is all too common occurrence, there is some great innovation in the UK but traditionally they concepts aren't followed through to commercialisation.
It happened to Sir Frank Whittle and the jet engine and consequently the first supersonic fighter, the Bell 1 which was based on the British design after the British Government withdrew funding for the project.
There was also the debacle over public key crypto research at GCHQ.
Donald Davies worked a the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex, unfortunately the British Govt/Grants agency didn't see the potential of the invention at the time and no funded was given, so he went over to APRA who were throwing money at anything.
Donald died June last year at in Australia, where he went to retire, he didn't get a lot of recognition outside of a few small circles, but he did get quite a few awards from the various computing institutions in the UK, I think he's still relatively unknown in the US, probably because he was too modest, which is why some many scientists can claim to have invented Packet Switching.
Lol... I didn't even count Channel5, are they still going?
The 'Learning Zone' by definition is not standard BBC2 but the Open University, that doesn't really count, BBC2 doesn't carry any logos any other times.
The T4 is kids stuff... they always experiment with that, just like they did by ARC'ing 4:9 into 16:9, unfortunately there is habit of introducing this onto primetime content.
BBC 1 switches to BBC News 24 at about 1.00am and that has a whopping logo *and* a Web site URL permanently in the corner."
Yeah... that's because it's News24 and not BBC1! They just switch over instead of leaving a black screen, BBC1 never carries logo's on its content, as I mentioned earlier the News channels are tagged, which doesn't really bother me, you're being pedantic there.
As for my lies... the BBC and ITV have never carried logo's during their standard terrestrial programming, and certainly not at primetime, pointing to the niche programming or simulcasting carried at night is picking hairs I'm afraid.
Of course the other channels on Digital terrestrial/cable/satellite is a different matter, I personally find the SkyOne logo annoying, as for some other channels the programming is vastly more annoying and content deficient than any logo, which is just the icing on the cake.
It's not a ISA though, it was an original design created by one company who license its use out to many, many other companies who then go onto include the core in their designs. The commonality of ARM doesn't suddenly make it public domain, Microsoft permeates the desktop market that doesn't mean by virtue of it's commonality it becomes an open standard.
You're making out it was an open royalty free standard created through group effort by a consortium of industry players, like SDRAM, PCI etc then one company has come along and hijacked it, which is not the case.
I must say that ARM are a pretty cool company not the usual nasty corporate bully that Slashdot likes to portray, it's nice to think a bit of the Acorn lives on in nearly every mobile phone and PDA's etc.
However... remember ARM are purely an IP company they don't manufacture stuff like Intel so IP is their sole source of income, if you remove that, they die, I don't blame them for defending it, whether is was 'reverse-engineered' or produced from original designs is beside the point... it implements the ARM instruction set and therefore infringes upon ARM's patents.
Of course people here will probably bleat on about how any company could have the audacity to creative new products and patent stuff, but they make good products and spent a lot of cash producing those designs, revenue is needed in order to produce better products, like X-Scale for example, Intel have a ARM architecture license due to numerous entangled lawsuits and cross licensing.
I don't think ARM has much to worry about anyway, if a fab actually started producing cores on this design then ARM en masse then they could sue the hell out of them or the companies that use them in final products, ARM designs permeate many chips and designs out here so gaining access to a legitimate design is not a monumental task, but fabbing millions of chips illegitimately is not easy to get away with since people would definitely notice.
Yeah... the BBC and ITV never tagged anything, but when they launched their digital channels they went and stuck logo's all over the place. I don't think they'll tag the mainstream channels, it would seriously pee people off.
I can remember when SkyOne never had any logo's on anologue satellite, graphics on stuff like MTV, VH1, TheBox or the news channels have never bothered me since you generally don't watch them intensely.
At least they're not stuck all over the movie channels (not PPV) apart from Carlton Cinema.
It's quite the opposite in the UK... we never really had them and we don't want them!
All the mainstream channels don't include any tags and wouldn't dare to do so, however since the launch of DigitalTV around three years ago and the numerous stations that came with it... they started to put logo's on channels to differentiate themselves (so you can tell crap from crap).
But it seems it caught on and even the new BBC channels include it like BBC Choice, Knowledge and News24, they all include a subtle alpha channelled logo in the top left, for MTV/Music and News it's not really that bad but if you want to sit down and watch a programme then they become annoying.
But at least we don't have to contend with any adverts on some channels, I sometimes watch ABC evening news here, there is a break every 4-5 minutes, then the news is filled with sentimental dross in-between, you watch it and feel as informed as watching a brick wall, they call this news ?!? Fox News isn't even worth mentioning, do people serious watch that?
At least CNN has something going for it.
Re:The only worry is about pirate games...
on
Gamecube Guts
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
They are not hardware compatible with standard DVD's, first of all none of the DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW or DVD-RAM drives are able to write two layer discs, then you have the added problem with the protection strips, and as somebody else has indicated the discs spin in an inverse spiral, that's even if you can get hold of the discs since they're a custom size and spec. This isn't like PSX games, it would be very difficult to burn these things with a off the shelf DVD burner.
As you indicated if a relatively simply operation allows people to play dodgy games then a lot of people will go down that path, Nintendo know this too well, hence all the engineering to make the drive as non-standard as possible, even if this means they have to fab and press non-standard discs at added cost it's still worth it in their eyes.
I doubt taking the top off the box will let you use standard CDR's as stated before, if it doesn't play RedBook audio disc's then I doubt it plays any ISO9660 discs. They might have gone as far as using a different laser wavelength than standard DVD's.
Re:The only worry is about pirate games...
on
Gamecube Guts
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Remember these 'wee' discs are not the same as the 8mm mini CD's you find now and then, they are truly weird custom 5mm DVD's which I doubt you'll ever find on the market unless some factory in China does a major haul. They are also double-layered, none of the DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW drives handle double-layered discs of any kind.
I doubt the GC could play games from CDR, given the fact it doesn't read Redbook audio discs this probably indicates it doesn't read CD's at all.
Also... did you see the custom authentication strips on the innerside of the disc, try and get your DVD-R to burn those!
Just like the Hauppauge DVB boards... I have one here in the UK and the kick ass, Linux TV not only produce Linux drivers for them but a whole suite of utilities that do PVR functionality, time shiting and 'dvbstream' that actually lets you redirect the MPEG2 transport stream to various other PC's over the network.
On a related note, I picked up a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) digtal radio receiver the other day, I can save the MP2 baseband strem directly to disk... no loss of quality, you can actually record all the stations within the same multiplex at once since they all come through the same COFDM transport stream. The datacasts are pretty smooth (and quick) too.. take a look at radio, if they get this into portable devices then this will give 3G a run for its money when it comes to rudimentary information like news, sports scores etc:)
But they're using a separate temperature probe and modified bios! The problem is most mobo manufacturers don't include the bios code to shut the system down... or cheap mobo's don't include a thermal diode at all. What they have demonstrated isn't implemented on 99% of the Athlon systems out there, Intel is somewhat better, this isn't going to save Joe Blogg's chip.
The new Athlon XP+ range now includes an internal diode like most Intel chips, by the time external sensors beneath the ZIF reacted it was too late, fried chip. So an internal diode, great you may think, but basically nobody has implemented the code to even query the sensor let alone set up the board to auto-shutdown. Tom used a board that implemented reading the internal sensor, it did just that, but the auto-off functionality wasn't there, again, fried chip. If AMD have to use an older Athlon with an external diode then it pretty much proves the functionality for reading Athlon XP sensors isn't on any board, yet.
Also... this thing crashes, certainly better than a fried chip but remember the P4 automatically scales clockspeed to temperate and doesn't crash, even if it means running at 100mhz (no data loss).
The HP drives are just rebadged Philips internals, the early ones sucked, I had a HP 6020 2x CDR in 1997, it died within months, they replaced it with another, it died.
In fact the products sucked that much that a bunch of US consumers initated a class action suit against HP and Philips and won. I believe you're entitled to $150 or a new drive if you were unfortunate enough to have purchased this drive.
I had a nice little chat to HP UK about the above class action and they offered to send me a new SCSI CDRW drive, it was to shut me up, I guess they didn't want risk the same action happening in the UK, especially now precedent had been set.
We're not talking about $90 CDRW's you see today, I paid £350 (~$500) for the 6020 SCSI in 1997, so you can see why people felt a little cheated when it died after 4 months.
Now, I'm not usually one for supporting the heranging of companies with frivolous claims (e.g. hot coffee burnt me, doh) but there were some serious technical deficiencies with this drive which shouldn't have gone to production in its current state, in effect many people became beta testers at a very expensive price, so they did have good grounds.
Slashdot Mirror
ITV certainly have to pay dues for their broadcasting rights, I think this money goes to HM Treasury not the BBC, but it probably goes toward paying for the World Service grant in aid.
The inconsistencies you point out are valid, but considering the BBC was the first broadcaster (in the world?) if you bought a radio/tv years ago it was asumed you were buying it to watch the BBC since there was nothing else. The system dates back to the 20's and is a little archaic, but it works, since all the signals (including the digital mux) are Free-To-Air how could they serious administer a system if people could just come along and say "I only watch ITV".
For £120 it's not worth the trouble, even if you don't watch the BBC you have to remember it keeps the commercial broadcasters in check, which is why we don't have adverts every 5 minutes like some countries.
However, I'm not sure whether I'd pay for commercial radio, it would absolutely have to be a cut above the rest and carry no adverts or sponsorship (like the BBC). I heard XM is only using 64kbps datarates for its stereo service, I wouldn't fancy that. I know one company in the UK is having problems trying to persuade people to subscribe to Digital Terrestrial TV, but that's mainly because the SkyDigital people have wiped the floor with them.
"This IS London"
And to celebrate they've just started selling DAB (Digital) Radio's for under £100, you can get one for your PC for £49, great for recording stuff in native MP2 (MPEG audio was originally created for this).
The stuff is still too expensive for mainstream though.
It's amazing how people can stare at a 60Hz boob tube for hours on end and not complain yet find a little LED flickering at 60Hz irritable :) My mate bought a 100Hz DTV then complained about the DRC-MF post processing then set it back to 50Hz :/
No... seriously, I bought some LED Christmas lights around 7-8 years ago, I just got them out the loft yesterday when I was getting the decorations out.
I've had some since around 1992... but that's innovation for you.
This reminds me of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) last January, the town sits within a valley with snow covered mountains each side, they used a high powered laser to project words onto the snowy hill above the town, you could submit messages through the web or via SMS (GSM text).
When it comes to British inventors/inventions this is all too common occurrence, there is some great innovation in the UK but traditionally they concepts aren't followed through to commercialisation.
It happened to Sir Frank Whittle and the jet engine and consequently the first supersonic fighter, the Bell 1 which was based on the British design after the British Government withdrew funding for the project.
There was also the debacle over public key crypto research at GCHQ.
Donald Davies worked a the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex, unfortunately the British Govt/Grants agency didn't see the potential of the invention at the time and no funded was given, so he went over to APRA who were throwing money at anything.
Donald died June last year at in Australia, where he went to retire, he didn't get a lot of recognition outside of a few small circles, but he did get quite a few awards from the various computing institutions in the UK, I think he's still relatively unknown in the US, probably because he was too modest, which is why some many scientists can claim to have invented Packet Switching.
Yahoo! is big enough to fight for itself, they are perfectly able to hire the best lawyers to represent them.
The same can't be said for independent software developers who are up againsts lawyers like the above, that is the forte of the EFF.
The 'Learning Zone' by definition is not standard BBC2 but the Open University, that doesn't really count, BBC2 doesn't carry any logos any other times.
The T4 is kids stuff... they always experiment with that, just like they did by ARC'ing 4:9 into 16:9, unfortunately there is habit of introducing this onto primetime content.
Yeah... that's because it's News24 and not BBC1! They just switch over instead of leaving a black screen, BBC1 never carries logo's on its content, as I mentioned earlier the News channels are tagged, which doesn't really bother me, you're being pedantic there.
As for my lies... the BBC and ITV have never carried logo's during their standard terrestrial programming, and certainly not at primetime, pointing to the niche programming or simulcasting carried at night is picking hairs I'm afraid.
Of course the other channels on Digital terrestrial/cable/satellite is a different matter, I personally find the SkyOne logo annoying, as for some other channels the programming is vastly more annoying and content deficient than any logo, which is just the icing on the cake.
It's not a ISA though, it was an original design created by one company who license its use out to many, many other companies who then go onto include the core in their designs. The commonality of ARM doesn't suddenly make it public domain, Microsoft permeates the desktop market that doesn't mean by virtue of it's commonality it becomes an open standard.
You're making out it was an open royalty free standard created through group effort by a consortium of industry players, like SDRAM, PCI etc then one company has come along and hijacked it, which is not the case.
I must say that ARM are a pretty cool company not the usual nasty corporate bully that Slashdot likes to portray, it's nice to think a bit of the Acorn lives on in nearly every mobile phone and PDA's etc.
However... remember ARM are purely an IP company they don't manufacture stuff like Intel so IP is their sole source of income, if you remove that, they die, I don't blame them for defending it, whether is was 'reverse-engineered' or produced from original designs is beside the point... it implements the ARM instruction set and therefore infringes upon ARM's patents.
Of course people here will probably bleat on about how any company could have the audacity to creative new products and patent stuff, but they make good products and spent a lot of cash producing those designs, revenue is needed in order to produce better products, like X-Scale for example, Intel have a ARM architecture license due to numerous entangled lawsuits and cross licensing.
I don't think ARM has much to worry about anyway, if a fab actually started producing cores on this design then ARM en masse then they could sue the hell out of them or the companies that use them in final products, ARM designs permeate many chips and designs out here so gaining access to a legitimate design is not a monumental task, but fabbing millions of chips illegitimately is not easy to get away with since people would definitely notice.
Yeah... the BBC and ITV never tagged anything, but when they launched their digital channels they went and stuck logo's all over the place. I don't think they'll tag the mainstream channels, it would seriously pee people off.
I can remember when SkyOne never had any logo's on anologue satellite, graphics on stuff like MTV, VH1, TheBox or the news channels have never bothered me since you generally don't watch them intensely.
At least they're not stuck all over the movie channels (not PPV) apart from Carlton Cinema.
All the mainstream channels don't include any tags and wouldn't dare to do so, however since the launch of DigitalTV around three years ago and the numerous stations that came with it... they started to put logo's on channels to differentiate themselves (so you can tell crap from crap).
But it seems it caught on and even the new BBC channels include it like BBC Choice, Knowledge and News24, they all include a subtle alpha channelled logo in the top left, for MTV/Music and News it's not really that bad but if you want to sit down and watch a programme then they become annoying.
But at least we don't have to contend with any adverts on some channels, I sometimes watch ABC evening news here, there is a break every 4-5 minutes, then the news is filled with sentimental dross in-between, you watch it and feel as informed as watching a brick wall, they call this news ?!? Fox News isn't even worth mentioning, do people serious watch that?
At least CNN has something going for it.
They are not hardware compatible with standard DVD's, first of all none of the DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW or DVD-RAM drives are able to write two layer discs, then you have the added problem with the protection strips, and as somebody else has indicated the discs spin in an inverse spiral, that's even if you can get hold of the discs since they're a custom size and spec. This isn't like PSX games, it would be very difficult to burn these things with a off the shelf DVD burner.
As you indicated if a relatively simply operation allows people to play dodgy games then a lot of people will go down that path, Nintendo know this too well, hence all the engineering to make the drive as non-standard as possible, even if this means they have to fab and press non-standard discs at added cost it's still worth it in their eyes.
I doubt taking the top off the box will let you use standard CDR's as stated before, if it doesn't play RedBook audio disc's then I doubt it plays any ISO9660 discs. They might have gone as far as using a different laser wavelength than standard DVD's.
Remember these 'wee' discs are not the same as the 8mm mini CD's you find now and then, they are truly weird custom 5mm DVD's which I doubt you'll ever find on the market unless some factory in China does a major haul. They are also double-layered, none of the DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW drives handle double-layered discs of any kind.
I doubt the GC could play games from CDR, given the fact it doesn't read Redbook audio discs this probably indicates it doesn't read CD's at all.
Also... did you see the custom authentication strips on the innerside of the disc, try and get your DVD-R to burn those!
Needs a Digital Radio (DAB) reciever so it can pickup audio and data broadcasts.
Just like the Hauppauge DVB boards... I have one here in the UK and the kick ass, Linux TV not only produce Linux drivers for them but a whole suite of utilities that do PVR functionality, time shiting and 'dvbstream' that actually lets you redirect the MPEG2 transport stream to various other PC's over the network.
:)
On a related note, I picked up a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) digtal radio receiver the other day, I can save the MP2 baseband strem directly to disk... no loss of quality, you can actually record all the stations within the same multiplex at once since they all come through the same COFDM transport stream. The datacasts are pretty smooth (and quick) too.. take a look at radio, if they get this into portable devices then this will give 3G a run for its money when it comes to rudimentary information like news, sports scores etc
But they're using a separate temperature probe and modified bios! The problem is most mobo manufacturers don't include the bios code to shut the system down... or cheap mobo's don't include a thermal diode at all. What they have demonstrated isn't implemented on 99% of the Athlon systems out there, Intel is somewhat better, this isn't going to save Joe Blogg's chip.
The new Athlon XP+ range now includes an internal diode like most Intel chips, by the time external sensors beneath the ZIF reacted it was too late, fried chip. So an internal diode, great you may think, but basically nobody has implemented the code to even query the sensor let alone set up the board to auto-shutdown. Tom used a board that implemented reading the internal sensor, it did just that, but the auto-off functionality wasn't there, again, fried chip. If AMD have to use an older Athlon with an external diode then it pretty much proves the functionality for reading Athlon XP sensors isn't on any board, yet.
Also... this thing crashes, certainly better than a fried chip but remember the P4 automatically scales clockspeed to temperate and doesn't crash, even if it means running at 100mhz (no data loss).
Looks like the same monopoly we read about just a couple of days ago on /.
The HP drives are just rebadged Philips internals, the early ones sucked, I had a HP 6020 2x CDR in 1997, it died within months, they replaced it with another, it died.
In fact the products sucked that much that a bunch of US consumers initated a class action suit against HP and Philips and won. I believe you're entitled to $150 or a new drive if you were unfortunate enough to have purchased this drive.
I had a nice little chat to HP UK about the above class action and they offered to send me a new SCSI CDRW drive, it was to shut me up, I guess they didn't want risk the same action happening in the UK, especially now precedent had been set.
We're not talking about $90 CDRW's you see today, I paid £350 (~$500) for the 6020 SCSI in 1997, so you can see why people felt a little cheated when it died after 4 months.
Now, I'm not usually one for supporting the heranging of companies with frivolous claims (e.g. hot coffee burnt me, doh) but there were some serious technical deficiencies with this drive which shouldn't have gone to production in its current state, in effect many people became beta testers at a very expensive price, so they did have good grounds.
Britain actually.