Well I guess it's a shame it never caught on at the time, but it doesn't really matter now, since Digital has been up and running in the UK for over 2 years, making PAL and PAL+ obsolete, in fact, its failure may of accelerated DTV deployment, they just jumped a generation. Anyway, today's Digital WideScrean sets beat the pants off PAL+ and use the spectrum more effectively, and the Teletext no longer looks like a 1980's retro joke.
There are 7 million homes with Digital in the UK apparently, according to a Wired story from today.
"In the United Kingdom, about 7 million people have some kind of interactive TV subscription, more than any other country in the world."
That's quite a surprise (for a third world country?:), I just wish the broadband access could of been so far-ahead. (I do have a cable modem now though, but it took long enough, especially when there were no technical reasons delaying the rollout, the cable network is only ~5 years old).
Obviously, a lot of those 7 million are watching through set-top-boxes with cropped anamorphic pictures on an existing 4:3 set, but I saw a 22" 16:9 set with a digital tuner in a shop recently for around £399 (just under $600us). The prices of the new sets have dropped precipitously, whilst the old 4:3 analogue sets are becoming a rare oddity. It helps that the broadcasters have switched over to the new standard too.
I've seen a couple of Sony widescreen (anologue) PAL+ sets from about 1995, they were pretty smart, however as you said, it really ate up the spectrum. And the amorphic cropping didn#t look too smart when a standard PAL 4:3 channel was displayed.
The modern Sony WEGA 16:9 sets with intergrated digital tuners look way smoother, and the Dolby surrond beats the pants of NICAM. PAL+ obviously didn't have DigitalText either, but I think there was an incremental update to the old Teletext standard.
The Japanese HDTV standard from the early 90's was originally anologue just like PAL+, it flopped and a bunch of government back research went down the pan. However, they've seen sense and now use MPEG2 based broadcasts, but the US and Japan aren't using the COFDM encoding scheme thought because of the spectrum issues, IBOC sounds good, if the encoding actually works.
This is similar to what Lucent are doing for their Digital Radio encoding, it's called "In Band On Channel" (IBOC), it's a nice idea since you don't need to allocate new spectrum. The first widespread commercial application originated in RDS radio services in Europe, where stations encode a few bytes of data along with the FM channel, such as station titles, genre's, time, and traffic alerts, auto-tunning. (this is at a low bitrate).
However, IBOC suffers from multipath problems (propagation of frequencies when they bounce of buildings, causing a delay, and therefore 'ghosting'), the power of the transmitter has to be greater, and the transmitter proximity has to be closer, otherwise you just drop back to the anologue signal.
It's a nice idea, but as always there's no such thing as a free lunch, it's always nicer and more efficient to allocate a specific block of frequency to specific device or application.
The Digital Radio (DAB) standard in Europe uses the old Band-III channel (~200Mhz) that was once used for very old 405 line B&W broadcasts, I think the BBC used this frequency back in the 1930's.
Yeah... check some of the pictures from this post too, the "Sealand Security" guy makes me laugh, that's really gonna scare the British Para's or Ghurkha Regiment (think little ninja style soldiers kicking ass)
Yeah... but the RIAA has some good friends in the form of British Phonographic Industry (The RIAA's equivalent number), considering ~ 25% of the world's commercial music comes from the UK, they usually have something to say about these matters.
It's not even a natural island... it's a very small platform about the size of a McDonalds, it doesn't even look like an island, it's just resembles an oil platform:)
The Brits could literally blow it off the face of the earth in a second if they wanted to, and do you think these guys are gonna be any defence against a cruise missile?;-) (how about one of those Tomahawk's the Brits have just bought off the US?)
There's a picture of some geeks inside the place too. And one of the boss, Sean Hastings, did anyone say Alan Cox?
Also, the island has to patch its satellite/microware link back to the mainland somewhere, the government could just put pressure on the upstream provider.
Considering the Brits actually built the island as WW2 defence platform, maybe this could affect the sovereignty of the island. When the courts last ruled on the independence of the platform, it was purely a humours peculiarity bought forward by an ex-military eccentric, obviously they didn't envision data heavens when they made the ruling back in the 60's, after all, who would want a decaying remote platform stuck on the east coast, they thought. I'm sure the government were happy to give the platform away so they didn't have to bother paying maintenance or demolition costs (at the time).
Being only 20 miles of the coast is a little precarious, it could be annexed at any time.
Yeah, 802.11a works at ~ 5.4ghz and is capable of upto 54mbps, HyperLAN2 also has similar speeds and works at 5ghz, both use OFDM radio encoding, however the MAC layer differs between the standards.
Quite true... and it probably is, but they're obviously keeping some headroom in the standard for future versions.
Also it's the old situation where something is technically possible, however it would be too expensive to produce on scale at the moment, and the fact it would cannibalize your upgrade revenue.
802.11b is actually capable of 22mbps with an enhanced encoding scheme, it still uses the current 2.4ghz spectrum and with the same powerlevels. Watch out for 802.11g later on this year for 22mbps over 2.4ghz.
After that comes 802.11a and HyperLAN2 (a similar European spec, but with adaptive frequencies and QoS).
Yes... not only in size, but in power, at 400mbps with complex encoding schemes it will eat up quite a bit of power, and the radio's will not be cheap.
I doubt we'll see it in palm top's anytime soon (apart from expensive addon's), Bluetooth is destined for this market because it's cheap to produce and is power efficient, but obviously limited to 1mbps.
Yeah... but you have to remember Firewire was limited to 4.5m through the original copper cables anyway, so it's actually a decent distance.
It's basically a high bandwidth PAN like Bluetooth, but obviously the datarate is far greater. 12m is enough for to link a VCR or DVD to a TV, and it's far enough to link your CamCorder up without bothering without cables. You could plug in a DVD player with only the need for a powercord.
You have to remember the standard probably goes farther distances at lower datarates.
Digital WideScreen TV's in the UK have a smartcard slot in the set like the ones found in DVB satellite recievers, even if you don't want to subscribe to an OnDigital (like cable or satellite, but just thru an ariel), you still need a smartcard to watch the free-to-air BBC channels.
The reason is to enforce licensing, however the SmartCard issued will only work with the transmitter in your area, so say you moved from Birmingham to London... the smartcard would stop working:/
The Sony WEGA DTV sets also have a PCMCIA slot:) neat.
Yeah... I do actually know what [sic] means, we were taught decent grammar at school:) I thought the original poster inserted it when he was quoting from the original FBI document, I didn't know the FBI were intern quoting another source.
It seems he was a pretty decent geek too according to this place:-
Hanssen is known to be "highly skilled in the use of computers and computer programming," according to the FBI's search warrant request.
In fact, he maintains his own computer server and is a registered Linux user, WorldNetDaily has learned.
There's a similar thing happend in Britain where a company has published "UK-Info Disk", they basically take all the divergent and distributed information from electoral roles, land registry, tax registration, private marketing databases, phone books and then combine and link all the information together on Ordinent Survey maps, so basically you have find out huge amounts of information from a simple postcode (zip).
There's also cracks of the program that let you back trace the database and do any number of reverse lookups (criminals find this especially useful). It seems the developers purposely put these weaknesses into the product as hidden features.
Because the data is legally obtained in the UK then sent to the Caymen Isles or processing it basically circumvents all the British Data Protection and Freedom of Information Laws.
The Info Disk company have spun off 192.com which offers similar services, ironically they advertise the "The Big Breach" book from a former MI6 officer on their front-page, a book which is somewhat forbidden in the UK... however 192.com are hardly champions of free-speech when you delve into the infringing and questionable practices they use.
Basically the Vatican, the home of Catholicism, I believe it has it's own status as a principality within Rome. They even have their own domain name,.va
I'm not catholic if you're wondering, but I just know these things.
Re:What other memory technologies are in the works
on
Motorola Mocks-up MRAM
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· Score: 1
You're right, it won't really find its way into PC's, not for a very long-time anyway, the market focus at the moment is handheld/portable devices that have stringent power requirements.
There's little point using it in PC's because the access times are slower than SDRAM, it's expensive to produce (especially so when you're talking about 256meg +), and it's already possible to have instant-on PC's already using Suspend-to-RAM with cheap SDRAM and an ATX power supply.
MRAM is a good technology and has a good niche, it's superior to flash memory (which it's destined to replace), however people seem to think it's a general purpose memory that will replace all existing standards, this is not quite the case.
My PC already has instant on (or "OnNow"), all ATX power supplies produce an ancillary current even when the PC is off (soft-off). I have a Gigabyte motherboard, they use this current to keep the DIMM banks powered when the box is off, and therefore the data is retained (this is different from 'standby' btw, the machine is 'off'). When I power back on, it takes about 2-3 seconds then I'm right back into the OS. (This is all in the ACPI spec)
Instant on PC's is not the purpose of MRAM, basically because it's too costly to use as system memory and unnecessary especially when ATX can just keep cheap SDRAM powered. It's great for handheld computers though and devices that have low power constraints and need fast data access, writing to flash memory is relatively low (compared to SDRAM) and it requires a decent amount of power, it's also expensive to produce, MRAM hopes to solve these problems.
Well... this study has blown apart RC4 encryption used in 802.11b devices, and it just so happends the 128bit devices use RC4, it doesn't matter how secure the encryption is... if the devices do not exchange keys securely.
As always with security, you shouldn't have a single point of failure... make sure you encrypt the upper level protocols with the likes of VPND, IPSec or something similar.
Coincidentally, it has been reported that sensitive data from the Davo's World Economic Forum was stolen last week, and Microsoft and Compaq were touting the benefits of 802.11b network on the iPaq PocketPC, they issued all 2300 attendees with a device and installed numerous access points throughout the complex, hotel's etc. I wonder if this could of been the source of the exploit ?
It seems wherever Bill Gates (cheesy grin) goes... security flaws travel with him (like a fly to sh1t).
The board in question isn't a SocketA (479) Athlon board... it's a dual FC370 P3 board, hence the name "Apollo Pro 266" on the sticker by the box, the Apollo name is given to Via's P3 range rather than their 'KT100' or 'KT266' type names given to Via's Athlon chipsets.
There's a lot of assumption going on here... the article says nothing about the government forcing people to have these devices fitted to their cars, the government can't even force people to have imobilisers let alone this.
This story is actually old news, it was on the BBC news maybe 12 months ago, the main idea was to fit the device to fleet type vehicles and vans etc, not private vehicles. E.g. so Mr. UPS can't do 70mph past a school, just because he's late for a delivery.
Also, I believe just an alert system, rather than a control system was being planned for the commercial area, i.e. so your car would tell you on the dash board what the speed limit is in the area, but it doesn't actually force you to drive at that speed, this cuts down on signage and confusion.
Forcing a car to drive at a certain speed is actually quite dangerious, i.e. if you need a quite burst of power to get your out of trouble, or you need to make a quick get away on a T junction. I'm sure the government is more than aware of the above failings, and probably more, hence the alert system.
Nope... UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is an entirely new packet switched system that uses a different frequency to GSM (well up in the 2ghz scale), it's a new standard which is CDMA based (GSM was TMDA based) and is not backward compatible with GSM unless the phone includes two radios.
The services you're talking about that enhance GSM's data capabilities are EDGE, GPRS and HSCSD. These form the 2.5G networks and offer data speeds between 50kbps and 400kbps.
UMTS networks wont be prevalent until 2002, however the Isle of Man in the UK has had a UMTS network running since the summer as a test bed.
The DAB standard is pretty sweet when it comes to this, it can reieve standard digital anologue broadcasts and also had a band to receive digital signals from satellites.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 7 million homes with Digital in the UK apparently, according to a Wired story from today. That's quite a surprise (for a third world country?
Obviously, a lot of those 7 million are watching through set-top-boxes with cropped anamorphic pictures on an existing 4:3 set, but I saw a 22" 16:9 set with a digital tuner in a shop recently for around £399 (just under $600us). The prices of the new sets have dropped precipitously, whilst the old 4:3 analogue sets are becoming a rare oddity. It helps that the broadcasters have switched over to the new standard too.
I've seen a couple of Sony widescreen (anologue) PAL+ sets from about 1995, they were pretty smart, however as you said, it really ate up the spectrum. And the amorphic cropping didn#t look too smart when a standard PAL 4:3 channel was displayed.
The modern Sony WEGA 16:9 sets with intergrated digital tuners look way smoother, and the Dolby surrond beats the pants of NICAM. PAL+ obviously didn't have DigitalText either, but I think there was an incremental update to the old Teletext standard.
The Japanese HDTV standard from the early 90's was originally anologue just like PAL+, it flopped and a bunch of government back research went down the pan. However, they've seen sense and now use MPEG2 based broadcasts, but the US and Japan aren't using the COFDM encoding scheme thought because of the spectrum issues, IBOC sounds good, if the encoding actually works.
This is similar to what Lucent are doing for their Digital Radio encoding, it's called "In Band On Channel" (IBOC), it's a nice idea since you don't need to allocate new spectrum. The first widespread commercial application originated in RDS radio services in Europe, where stations encode a few bytes of data along with the FM channel, such as station titles, genre's, time, and traffic alerts, auto-tunning. (this is at a low bitrate).
However, IBOC suffers from multipath problems (propagation of frequencies when they bounce of buildings, causing a delay, and therefore 'ghosting'), the power of the transmitter has to be greater, and the transmitter proximity has to be closer, otherwise you just drop back to the anologue signal.
It's a nice idea, but as always there's no such thing as a free lunch, it's always nicer and more efficient to allocate a specific block of frequency to specific device or application.
The Digital Radio (DAB) standard in Europe uses the old Band-III channel (~200Mhz) that was once used for very old 405 line B&W broadcasts, I think the BBC used this frequency back in the 1930's.
I've posted a basic translation here and there's a few others available in the directory.
Yeah ... check some of the pictures from this post too, the "Sealand Security" guy makes me laugh, that's really gonna scare the British Para's or Ghurkha Regiment (think little ninja style soldiers kicking ass)
Yeah... but the RIAA has some good friends in the form of British Phonographic Industry (The RIAA's equivalent number), considering ~ 25% of the world's commercial music comes from the UK, they usually have something to say about these matters.
It's not even a natural island... it's a very small platform about the size of a McDonalds, it doesn't even look like an island, it's just resembles an oil platform :)
;-) (how about one of those Tomahawk's the Brits have just bought off the US?)
The Brits could literally blow it off the face of the earth in a second if they wanted to, and do you think these guys are gonna be any defence against a cruise missile?
There's a picture of some geeks inside the place too. And one of the boss, Sean Hastings, did anyone say Alan Cox?
Also, the island has to patch its satellite/microware link back to the mainland somewhere, the government could just put pressure on the upstream provider.
Considering the Brits actually built the island as WW2 defence platform, maybe this could affect the sovereignty of the island. When the courts last ruled on the independence of the platform, it was purely a humours peculiarity bought forward by an ex-military eccentric, obviously they didn't envision data heavens when they made the ruling back in the 60's, after all, who would want a decaying remote platform stuck on the east coast, they thought. I'm sure the government were happy to give the platform away so they didn't have to bother paying maintenance or demolition costs (at the time).
Being only 20 miles of the coast is a little precarious, it could be annexed at any time.
Yeah, 802.11a works at ~ 5.4ghz and is capable of upto 54mbps, HyperLAN2 also has similar speeds and works at 5ghz, both use OFDM radio encoding, however the MAC layer differs between the standards.
Quite true... and it probably is, but they're obviously keeping some headroom in the standard for future versions.
Also it's the old situation where something is technically possible, however it would be too expensive to produce on scale at the moment, and the fact it would cannibalize your upgrade revenue.
802.11b is actually capable of 22mbps with an enhanced encoding scheme, it still uses the current 2.4ghz spectrum and with the same powerlevels. Watch out for 802.11g later on this year for 22mbps over 2.4ghz.
After that comes 802.11a and HyperLAN2 (a similar European spec, but with adaptive frequencies and QoS).
Yes... not only in size, but in power, at 400mbps with complex encoding schemes it will eat up quite a bit of power, and the radio's will not be cheap.
I doubt we'll see it in palm top's anytime soon (apart from expensive addon's), Bluetooth is destined for this market because it's cheap to produce and is power efficient, but obviously limited to 1mbps.
Yeah... but you have to remember Firewire was limited to 4.5m through the original copper cables anyway, so it's actually a decent distance.
It's basically a high bandwidth PAN like Bluetooth, but obviously the datarate is far greater. 12m is enough for to link a VCR or DVD to a TV, and it's far enough to link your CamCorder up without bothering without cables. You could plug in a DVD player with only the need for a powercord.
You have to remember the standard probably goes farther distances at lower datarates.
Digital WideScreen TV's in the UK have a smartcard slot in the set like the ones found in DVB satellite recievers, even if you don't want to subscribe to an OnDigital (like cable or satellite, but just thru an ariel), you still need a smartcard to watch the free-to-air BBC channels.
:/
:) neat.
The reason is to enforce licensing, however the SmartCard issued will only work with the transmitter in your area, so say you moved from Birmingham to London... the smartcard would stop working
The Sony WEGA DTV sets also have a PCMCIA slot
It seems he was a pretty decent geek too according to this place
You'd think the FBI would be capable of better grammar in an official affidavit that is presented to the courts, laywers, media etc.
If they can't even spell "existance" (sic) properly, no wonder it took these guys 15 years to catch him.
There's a similar thing happend in Britain where a company has published "UK-Info Disk", they basically take all the divergent and distributed information from electoral roles, land registry, tax registration, private marketing databases, phone books and then combine and link all the information together on Ordinent Survey maps, so basically you have find out huge amounts of information from a simple postcode (zip).
There's also cracks of the program that let you back trace the database and do any number of reverse lookups (criminals find this especially useful). It seems the developers purposely put these weaknesses into the product as hidden features.
Because the data is legally obtained in the UK then sent to the Caymen Isles or processing it basically circumvents all the British Data Protection and Freedom of Information Laws.
The Info Disk company have spun off 192.com which offers similar services, ironically they advertise the "The Big Breach" book from a former MI6 officer on their front-page, a book which is somewhat forbidden in the UK... however 192.com are hardly champions of free-speech when you delve into the infringing and questionable practices they use.
Basically the Vatican, the home of Catholicism, I believe it has it's own status as a principality within Rome. They even have their own domain name, .va
I'm not catholic if you're wondering, but I just know these things.
How does this differ from the long established Linux Hardware Database ?
You're right, it won't really find its way into PC's, not for a very long-time anyway, the market focus at the moment is handheld/portable devices that have stringent power requirements.
There's little point using it in PC's because the access times are slower than SDRAM, it's expensive to produce (especially so when you're talking about 256meg +), and it's already possible to have instant-on PC's already using Suspend-to-RAM with cheap SDRAM and an ATX power supply.
MRAM is a good technology and has a good niche, it's superior to flash memory (which it's destined to replace), however people seem to think it's a general purpose memory that will replace all existing standards, this is not quite the case.
My PC already has instant on (or "OnNow"), all ATX power supplies produce an ancillary current even when the PC is off (soft-off). I have a Gigabyte motherboard, they use this current to keep the DIMM banks powered when the box is off, and therefore the data is retained (this is different from 'standby' btw, the machine is 'off'). When I power back on, it takes about 2-3 seconds then I'm right back into the OS. (This is all in the ACPI spec)
Instant on PC's is not the purpose of MRAM, basically because it's too costly to use as system memory and unnecessary especially when ATX can just keep cheap SDRAM powered. It's great for handheld computers though and devices that have low power constraints and need fast data access, writing to flash memory is relatively low (compared to SDRAM) and it requires a decent amount of power, it's also expensive to produce, MRAM hopes to solve these problems.
Well... this study has blown apart RC4 encryption used in 802.11b devices, and it just so happends the 128bit devices use RC4, it doesn't matter how secure the encryption is... if the devices do not exchange keys securely.
As always with security, you shouldn't have a single point of failure... make sure you encrypt the upper level protocols with the likes of VPND, IPSec or something similar.
Coincidentally, it has been reported that sensitive data from the Davo's World Economic Forum was stolen last week, and Microsoft and Compaq were touting the benefits of 802.11b network on the iPaq PocketPC, they issued all 2300 attendees with a device and installed numerous access points throughout the complex, hotel's etc. I wonder if this could of been the source of the exploit ?
It seems wherever Bill Gates (cheesy grin) goes... security flaws travel with him (like a fly to sh1t).
The board in question isn't a SocketA (479) Athlon board... it's a dual FC370 P3 board, hence the name "Apollo Pro 266" on the sticker by the box, the Apollo name is given to Via's P3 range rather than their 'KT100' or 'KT266' type names given to Via's Athlon chipsets.
There's a lot of assumption going on here... the article says nothing about the government forcing people to have these devices fitted to their cars, the government can't even force people to have imobilisers let alone this.
This story is actually old news, it was on the BBC news maybe 12 months ago, the main idea was to fit the device to fleet type vehicles and vans etc, not private vehicles. E.g. so Mr. UPS can't do 70mph past a school, just because he's late for a delivery.
Also, I believe just an alert system, rather than a control system was being planned for the commercial area, i.e. so your car would tell you on the dash board what the speed limit is in the area, but it doesn't actually force you to drive at that speed, this cuts down on signage and confusion.
Forcing a car to drive at a certain speed is actually quite dangerious, i.e. if you need a quite burst of power to get your out of trouble, or you need to make a quick get away on a T junction. I'm sure the government is more than aware of the above failings, and probably more, hence the alert system.
Nope... UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is an entirely new packet switched system that uses a different frequency to GSM (well up in the 2ghz scale), it's a new standard which is CDMA based (GSM was TMDA based) and is not backward compatible with GSM unless the phone includes two radios.
The services you're talking about that enhance GSM's data capabilities are EDGE, GPRS and HSCSD. These form the 2.5G networks and offer data speeds between 50kbps and 400kbps.
UMTS networks wont be prevalent until 2002, however the Isle of Man in the UK has had a UMTS network running since the summer as a test bed.
Az.
The DAB standard is pretty sweet when it comes to this, it can reieve standard digital anologue broadcasts and also had a band to receive digital signals from satellites.
I wouldn't mind a WaveFinder for christmas.