If this is what you want it would be better to have software on cameraphones that recognizes already existing UPC barcodes. There are billions of products with UPCs, why not make use of this ubiqitous system instead of introducing a new one?
I do see the utility in semacodes but I think the UPC idea pales in comparison. Imagine walking into a bookstore seeing an interesting book, hmm let's check it on Amazon, oh they have a used copy at 1/3 the price, let's order that. All from your phone in a few seconds while you're in the store.
If a city has 5 formats of music on its airwaves and another less popular format is added to that mix, isn't that a good thing?
You seem to be arguing for scarcity of voices on the airwaves. I don't understand why when offered a choice between more or less broadcasters, more or less music formats, more or less news sources, you would choose less. Even if you yourself have no interest in having more choice of things to listen to could you not imagine there might be others that would?
If you think you have something people like, start a webcasting station.
Radio licenses in major markets are selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. Apparently someone thinks there's something worthwhile about radio. Perhaps it has something to do with the hundreds of millions of radio receivers lying around the country.
It's cheap and it's legal, unlike pirate radio.
Are you missing the fact that microbroadcasters don't think what they are doing should be illegal and that the FCC agrees with them on the technical basis of that? They aren't broadcasting because its illegal, they're broadcasting because they want to exercise free speech over the airwaves.
I agree with my sibling that your post is bullshit, though for different reasons.
You are right in that there is not enough space for everyone, but the FCC came up with a proposal to license thousands of microbroadcasters. Not everyone but certainly lots more than now. Congress voted this proposal down after having been purchased by the broadcast industry.
So you are wrong, that you cannot "always persuade the FCC to give the small station a license instead". This is what microbroadcasters have lobbied for years for. They finally got the FCC to agree with them that there were no technical reasons why this couldn't be done, but Congress overrode the FCC's technical findings in an unprecedented move.
I think this shoots down your absurd "the reason most "microbroadcasters" are "micro" is because nobody wants to listen to them", since you seem to believe its possible to obtain low power licenses. Radio diversity has declined dramatically in recent years and that's bad. There are many neighborhoods in urban areas that have minority populations that are not served by what's on the radio, having a microbroadcaster be able to serve them would be very valuable to them but would probably not appear as a blip in Clear Channel's spreadsheet.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought broadcast professionals are of one mind on this issue. I genuinely want to hear what the original poster thinks about the proposals to license thousands of LPFM's and whether the industry is motivated by genuine concern about interference. The poster laid out a position about allowing people access to the airwaves in a controlled manner. I want to know if the one the FCC came up with meets with his approval, and it would be signifcant to hear a radio professional say they are feel strongly enough about the issue to call their Congress critters.
I do admit, I would love to hear an insider call their industry a bunch of greedy pigs feeding at the public trough. But, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth:)
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about broadcasting over top of other stations so that people won't be able to listen to licensed stations. Having attended training sessions by people mentioned in the article they spend a great deal of time going over how to run a station so as not to interfere.
Think about it, if you wanted to run a radio station so that your music or news could be heard, would you broadcast on the same frequency as a station hundreds of times as powerful?
I'd be interested to hear your perspective on your industry's heavy lobbying to kill the LPFM service. And the results of the 2nd study that found that the interference concerns your industry raised were without merit.
I hope you will call your Congress people when a bill to allow the licensing of thousands of LPFM's is introduced this session.
There has been a proposal to do exactly this, however the broadcast industry purchased a vote by Congress to override the FCC's technical plan. Recently a followup study found the interference concerns were without merit, look for legislation to be introduced very soon that will allow thousands of low power FM stations to be licensed.
they get their kicks from broadcasting over another station
This statement makes absolutely no sense. I have attended workshops run by people mentioned in this article and they spend much time on how to broadcast without interfering. It takes quite a bit more work to not interfere, you have to buy extra equipment and use testing tools to do a survey. Its much easier to just slap together a kit and pick a frequency. That is not what the people in this article are about.
Most people that start radio stations want the station to be heard, overlapping with a transmitter hundreds of times more powerful is not the way to do it. If you read the article closely you would know that the LPFM movement is trying to get Congress to approve an FCC plan to license thousands of stations, after having shown that microbroadcasters can broadcast without interfering. Most of them are willing to work with the FCC if Congress will let the FCC work with them.
The FCC proposed doing just what you have said is impossible, that is, licensing thousands of low power FM stations. However, the broadcast industry purchased a vote in Congress to override the FCC's technical findings. They cut the number of stations from thousands to a few hundred by requiring overly strict and told the FCC to study it a second time. The FCC study came back recently with the same results as the first one, thousands of stations can be licensed w/o causing interference.
Watch for a new bill from John McCain to allow thousands of low power FM stations to be licensed. Maybe if you become more informed about the issue you will ask your Congress critters to support this legislation since your interference concerns have been allayed. If you want more info take a look at the Free Press LPFM page
My Palm phone is far, far, far more open and far more hackable than any other piece of consumer electronics I own, with the possible exception of Tivo.
In order to hack a Tivo you have to void the warranty by opening the case and mounting the HD in a PC. That doesn't sound more open than a device with a supported SDK and ways to load 3rd party apps.
There's no comparison between the BBC and US CPB supported public broadcasting.
First of all the difference in quality is vast. As a US resident I am grateful to the BBC, there are no decent news sources in the US for international news, the BBC is my primary source for this.
The BBC receives 2.3 billion pounds, receives 350 million dollars (I think its obvious that the difference in funding is so vast its not even worth converting to a per capita comparison). Almost as important as the amount of money is that the BBC's funding is independent, ie the TV tax is allocated to the BBC. CPB funding comes out of general funds and is thus subject to a yearly political fight for funds. Many Republican Congress-critters would love to kill CPB, for quite a while it was getting funded enough to keep it on live support. For a while PBS (the public tv network) especially was so bad that it was almost to the point of being so irrelevant as to not being worth fighting for.
UK'ers, if any of your politicians try to take away independent funding of the BBC or slash its budget, just point to the US public broadcasting system for how that will destroy the BBC.
The market is currently tiny, there's the potential for it to grow vastly in the next few years. Whether or not Apple will maintain its position is far from clear.
Let's say a cellphone company offered a killer package of handset intergrated with a music service. They could bundle it with one of their standard subscription plans and far surpass the number of iTunes users in pretty short order.
Real has had quite a bit more success in the cell phone area than Apple, its not hard to imagine a cell phone company choosing to do a partnership with Real.
I kind of see it as similar to Tivo. Tivo is the a wildly successful brand name that is virtually synonymous with PVR. But, the cable companies are rolling out their own PVRs and will very shortly steamroll Tivo.
... the guy building a cruise missle in his garage for under $5k. He actually says he'll make all the plans and specs available for the missle except the guidance control software because he deemed that too sensitive.
It depends on how they architect the network. If they have 121 seperate cells that creates a lot of aggregate bandwidth. The article says they are wanting to have 15-20 people per AP, which sounds reasonable.
I agree that its currently not worth the bother. There are just not enough convenient wifi devices (laptops are not convenient at a ball game) in people's hands to make this practical. When the cell phone and pda truly merge and have wifi standard then the infrastructure they've built to serve thousands of people might be worth the investment.
Maybe its like Verizon's NYC WAP in pay phone experiment. Its not intended to make money, its a research project so that they can figure out how people might want to use it in case in the future it becomes a real business.
What about bandwidth? Having many small coverage areas versus one big coverage increases available bandwidth. The 2nd article talks about wanting to limit each AP to 20-30 users, with the Vivato you have everyone on at most 3 APs (one for each non-overlapping channel).
Maybe the SF installation and FSU have different target bandwidth requirements.
Obviously the show is not intended for sysadmins, its intended for tech leaning average people. I've done the same explanation about wireless security and pointed people to the same NT password reset tool as were presented on the show to my friends.
This show is really good. People should download it and submit it to their public access cable TV stations. Most cable systems have a channel that anyone living in the area can submit shows to, a lot of it is boring religous programming, this would be much more interesting for most people to watch.
It varies from municipality to municipality exactly what needs to be done to get it on the channel. Some you can just call up and say "Hey download this file", others you might have to pay a membership fee and submit it on tape.
Re:why bt and not archive.org?
on
Thebroken Videos
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You can upload movies to their Open Source Movies Collection. They have other sections for audio and texts. They don't have an images section, I don't think there's been a demand for it, but I think if there was interest they would do it.
Re:why bt and not archive.org?
on
Thebroken Videos
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They've been/.'d before and survived. The dot com millionaire financing the project has said he'll pay for as much bandwidth and storage as is needed.
Another plus I forgot to mention is that they'll host any size file. So people upload DVD quality versions of their material and lower quality (mpeg4, vcd, modem quality) get generated automatically. Its nice, some people want to wait for the quality others want it fast.
I downloaded the file twice as fast from the mac.com mirror as I did from BT. About 30 min vs 60 min.
why bt and not archive.org?
on
Thebroken Videos
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm curious why people prefer to do their own hosting of self made video files and not use archive.org. They have 500mbps of outgoing bandwidth and hundreds of terabytes of storage. Anyone can upload any amount of multimedia for hosting for free. They'll be around for quite a while longer than whatever rigged solution people come up with on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is what you want it would be better to have software on cameraphones that recognizes already existing UPC barcodes. There are billions of products with UPCs, why not make use of this ubiqitous system instead of introducing a new one?
I do see the utility in semacodes but I think the UPC idea pales in comparison. Imagine walking into a bookstore seeing an interesting book, hmm let's check it on Amazon, oh they have a used copy at 1/3 the price, let's order that. All from your phone in a few seconds while you're in the store.
If a city has 5 formats of music on its airwaves and another less popular format is added to that mix, isn't that a good thing?
You seem to be arguing for scarcity of voices on the airwaves. I don't understand why when offered a choice between more or less broadcasters, more or less music formats, more or less news sources, you would choose less. Even if you yourself have no interest in having more choice of things to listen to could you not imagine there might be others that would?
If you think you have something people like, start a webcasting station.
Radio licenses in major markets are selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. Apparently someone thinks there's something worthwhile about radio. Perhaps it has something to do with the hundreds of millions of radio receivers lying around the country.
It's cheap and it's legal, unlike pirate radio.
Are you missing the fact that microbroadcasters don't think what they are doing should be illegal and that the FCC agrees with them on the technical basis of that? They aren't broadcasting because its illegal, they're broadcasting because they want to exercise free speech over the airwaves.
I agree with my sibling that your post is bullshit, though for different reasons.
You are right in that there is not enough space for everyone, but the FCC came up with a proposal to license thousands of microbroadcasters. Not everyone but certainly lots more than now. Congress voted this proposal down after having been purchased by the broadcast industry.
So you are wrong, that you cannot "always persuade the FCC to give the small station a license instead". This is what microbroadcasters have lobbied for years for. They finally got the FCC to agree with them that there were no technical reasons why this couldn't be done, but Congress overrode the FCC's technical findings in an unprecedented move.
I think this shoots down your absurd "the reason most "microbroadcasters" are "micro" is because nobody wants to listen to them", since you seem to believe its possible to obtain low power licenses. Radio diversity has declined dramatically in recent years and that's bad. There are many neighborhoods in urban areas that have minority populations that are not served by what's on the radio, having a microbroadcaster be able to serve them would be very valuable to them but would probably not appear as a blip in Clear Channel's spreadsheet.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought broadcast professionals are of one mind on this issue. I genuinely want to hear what the original poster thinks about the proposals to license thousands of LPFM's and whether the industry is motivated by genuine concern about interference. The poster laid out a position about allowing people access to the airwaves in a controlled manner. I want to know if the one the FCC came up with meets with his approval, and it would be signifcant to hear a radio professional say they are feel strongly enough about the issue to call their Congress critters.
:)
I do admit, I would love to hear an insider call their industry a bunch of greedy pigs feeding at the public trough. But, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about broadcasting over top of other stations so that people won't be able to listen to licensed stations. Having attended training sessions by people mentioned in the article they spend a great deal of time going over how to run a station so as not to interfere.
Think about it, if you wanted to run a radio station so that your music or news could be heard, would you broadcast on the same frequency as a station hundreds of times as powerful?
I'd be interested to hear your perspective on your industry's heavy lobbying to kill the LPFM service. And the results of the 2nd study that found that the interference concerns your industry raised were without merit.
I hope you will call your Congress people when a bill to allow the licensing of thousands of LPFM's is introduced this session.
There has been a proposal to do exactly this, however the broadcast industry purchased a vote by Congress to override the FCC's technical plan. Recently a followup study found the interference concerns were without merit, look for legislation to be introduced very soon that will allow thousands of low power FM stations to be licensed.
For background see the Free Press LPFM page.
they get their kicks from broadcasting over another station
This statement makes absolutely no sense. I have attended workshops run by people mentioned in this article and they spend much time on how to broadcast without interfering. It takes quite a bit more work to not interfere, you have to buy extra equipment and use testing tools to do a survey. Its much easier to just slap together a kit and pick a frequency. That is not what the people in this article are about.
Most people that start radio stations want the station to be heard, overlapping with a transmitter hundreds of times more powerful is not the way to do it. If you read the article closely you would know that the LPFM movement is trying to get Congress to approve an FCC plan to license thousands of stations, after having shown that microbroadcasters can broadcast without interfering. Most of them are willing to work with the FCC if Congress will let the FCC work with them.
The FCC proposed doing just what you have said is impossible, that is, licensing thousands of low power FM stations. However, the broadcast industry purchased a vote in Congress to override the FCC's technical findings. They cut the number of stations from thousands to a few hundred by requiring overly strict and told the FCC to study it a second time. The FCC study came back recently with the same results as the first one, thousands of stations can be licensed w/o causing interference.
Watch for a new bill from John McCain to allow thousands of low power FM stations to be licensed. Maybe if you become more informed about the issue you will ask your Congress critters to support this legislation since your interference concerns have been allayed. If you want more info take a look at the Free Press LPFM page
My Palm phone is far, far, far more open and far more hackable than any other piece of consumer electronics I own, with the possible exception of Tivo.
In order to hack a Tivo you have to void the warranty by opening the case and mounting the HD in a PC. That doesn't sound more open than a device with a supported SDK and ways to load 3rd party apps.
There's no comparison between the BBC and US CPB supported public broadcasting.
First of all the difference in quality is vast. As a US resident I am grateful to the BBC, there are no decent news sources in the US for international news, the BBC is my primary source for this.
The BBC receives 2.3 billion pounds, receives 350 million dollars (I think its obvious that the difference in funding is so vast its not even worth converting to a per capita comparison). Almost as important as the amount of money is that the BBC's funding is independent, ie the TV tax is allocated to the BBC. CPB funding comes out of general funds and is thus subject to a yearly political fight for funds. Many Republican Congress-critters would love to kill CPB, for quite a while it was getting funded enough to keep it on live support. For a while PBS (the public tv network) especially was so bad that it was almost to the point of being so irrelevant as to not being worth fighting for.
UK'ers, if any of your politicians try to take away independent funding of the BBC or slash its budget, just point to the US public broadcasting system for how that will destroy the BBC.
The market is currently tiny, there's the potential for it to grow vastly in the next few years. Whether or not Apple will maintain its position is far from clear.
Let's say a cellphone company offered a killer package of handset intergrated with a music service. They could bundle it with one of their standard subscription plans and far surpass the number of iTunes users in pretty short order.
Real has had quite a bit more success in the cell phone area than Apple, its not hard to imagine a cell phone company choosing to do a partnership with Real.
I kind of see it as similar to Tivo. Tivo is the a wildly successful brand name that is virtually synonymous with PVR. But, the cable companies are rolling out their own PVRs and will very shortly steamroll Tivo.
... the guy building a cruise missle in his garage for under $5k. He actually says he'll make all the plans and specs available for the missle except the guidance control software because he deemed that too sensitive.
This is on topic how?
It depends on how they architect the network. If they have 121 seperate cells that creates a lot of aggregate bandwidth. The article says they are wanting to have 15-20 people per AP, which sounds reasonable.
I agree that its currently not worth the bother. There are just not enough convenient wifi devices (laptops are not convenient at a ball game) in people's hands to make this practical. When the cell phone and pda truly merge and have wifi standard then the infrastructure they've built to serve thousands of people might be worth the investment.
Maybe its like Verizon's NYC WAP in pay phone experiment. Its not intended to make money, its a research project so that they can figure out how people might want to use it in case in the future it becomes a real business.
What about bandwidth? Having many small coverage areas versus one big coverage increases available bandwidth. The 2nd article talks about wanting to limit each AP to 20-30 users, with the Vivato you have everyone on at most 3 APs (one for each non-overlapping channel).
Maybe the SF installation and FSU have different target bandwidth requirements.
Obviously the show is not intended for sysadmins, its intended for tech leaning average people. I've done the same explanation about wireless security and pointed people to the same NT password reset tool as were presented on the show to my friends.
This show is really good. People should download it and submit it to their public access cable TV stations. Most cable systems have a channel that anyone living in the area can submit shows to, a lot of it is boring religous programming, this would be much more interesting for most people to watch.
It varies from municipality to municipality exactly what needs to be done to get it on the channel. Some you can just call up and say "Hey download this file", others you might have to pay a membership fee and submit it on tape.
You can upload movies to their Open Source Movies Collection. They have other sections for audio and texts. They don't have an images section, I don't think there's been a demand for it, but I think if there was interest they would do it.
They've been /.'d before and survived. The dot com millionaire financing the project has said he'll pay for as much bandwidth and storage as is needed.
Another plus I forgot to mention is that they'll host any size file. So people upload DVD quality versions of their material and lower quality (mpeg4, vcd, modem quality) get generated automatically. Its nice, some people want to wait for the quality others want it fast.
I downloaded the file twice as fast from the mac.com mirror as I did from BT. About 30 min vs 60 min.
I'm curious why people prefer to do their own hosting of self made video files and not use archive.org. They have 500mbps of outgoing bandwidth and hundreds of terabytes of storage. Anyone can upload any amount of multimedia for hosting for free. They'll be around for quite a while longer than whatever rigged solution people come up with on their own.
This DIY cruise missle would be a better example to scare people with than the V2.
There is some irony in that.
I think the next step would be to build Bittorrent into existing download managers and make it as transparent as possible.