DVB/S and DVB/T work very well for all other continents already. Why is it so hard to make it work for us here? Is it because of some sort of insatiable desire for HDTV that I've never actually seen?
There are a lot of reasons. First, the channel size in Europe is different than the US (8 MHz vs 6 MHz) which would make using identical technology impossible if we wanted to do a phased rollout.
Second, DVB is not considered by the FCC to be HDTV. The big thing is the whole interlaced non-square pixels thing at 4x3.
Third, ATSC is more efficient with the spectrum than DVB-T is. It requires less power to cover the same area (60% was the last number I heard.) Since a transmitter can cost upwards of $20,000 in electricity bills, that kind of savings is quite impressive.
And finally, the ability to run 4 channels on one 6 MHz block was attractive. It does generate some odd channels (2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3), but then so does radio.
Here are some comparisons:
DVB-T Aspect Ratio: 4x3 ATSC Aspect Ratio: 16x9
DVB-T Audio: MPEG-1 Audio ATSC Audio: Dolby Digital AC-3
DVB-T Modulation: COFDM ATSC Modulation: VSB
DVB-T Max Usable Bandwidth: 18.66 Mbps @ 5.7 MHz ATSC Max Usable Bandwidth: 19.39 Mbps @ 5.38 MHz
DVB-T Max Resolution: 2048x1152 ATSC Max Resolution: 1920x1080
Now there are some negatives. ATSC has been shown to have some problems with multipath interference and also not suitable for mobile devices (for some reason this was a big concern.)
No, an airplane is not a glider with power (I'm talking about hang-gliders not modern thermal gliders which actually do share technology with airplanes.)
An airplane creates lift by creating a high pressure zone below its wing. This is done by creating more surface area below its wing vs. above and having air move along it (more air will pass above than below creating a high pressure area under its wing.)
A glider creates lift by creating a high pressure zone below its wing. This is done by having a large surface and falling. There are also gliders that create a high pressure area by thermals and of course, flying near a large mountain (ground-effect.)
Re:Not only useful for dating...
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Googling For Dates?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I admit I have done this many times after interviewing people as a last check before hiring them. It is especially helpful when the perspective person is an active member of mailing lists that are archived on the web or on usenet for determining the technical skill of someone while they are doing something freelance such as linux kernel.
I imagine that this sort of thing will evolve into something a bit more formal, a Personal Information Agency (PIA) located offshore that maintains a database of everyone.
Companies could let them setup cameras in stores in return for having them do targeted marketing. Image recognition could be setup to determine who your friends are (who you are seen with on more than one occasion) and more!
There are also people like me who rate things as a method of tracking what they've already seen/read/used.
I find Netflix's rating engine to be a perfect method of tracking what movies I've already seen so I don't go and accidentally rent the same one twice. This has led me to have an awful lot of ratings (~2000 DVDs), but I can be fairly confident that everything in my rental queue is new.
Of course, rating things (1-5 stars) is very different from reviewing something. Reviewing something requires you to think rather hard about what you liked or didn't like about a product and is usually done because you have a strong emotion about it and feel the need to tell the world about it. Rating something is so much easier that it can be done without much thought at all, making it much more common.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I fail to see how this is any less secure than burying fiber and placing big signs around it warning there is a fiber drop so someone with a backhoe doesn't accidentally dig it up. Even in a city where the cable is buried under the road, there are access points all over the place.
In fact, many of these robots are built to run cable in piping that is inaccessible to humans so they are *more* secure than running fiber next to train tracks or under roads.
A Chicago to New York maglev is an insteresting proposition. That 750 miles equates to 1200km, and at the discount price of only $19 million per kilometer (half of the "projected" cost in Germany), amounts to $28 trillion.... We can get to Mars for a lot less.
That's $22.8 billion not $28 trillion. While $22.8 billion is a lot of money, it doesn't compare to road maintenance and highway patrol costs. The problem with Maglevs in such a populated area though is the number of stops.
In somewhere like California however, 350 miles between San Francisco and LA makes a lot of sense due to the cost of road maintenance, highway patrol, and the fact that it takes longer to board and leave the plane than it does to actually fly. Also because there is very little in central California anyone would want to stop for, so any stops could be very short or non-existant.
This is why I always thought the FCC should have licensed out an 80 MHz band to a particular technology that could be used by anyone rather than a specific class of devices that can all wreck havok with eachother using a mix of technologies.
It sure would have been nice if we had a cheap adaptive FHDSS system with a decent security layer.
Farscape is an American show filmed in Australia. It is produced by the Jim Henson company and Hallmark Entertainment for goodness sakes.
There are a whole lot of American shows that are not filmed in the United States, for instance Smallville (Canada), Survivor (all over the damn place) and of course all sorts of movies like The Matrix (Australia), Dark City (Australia), Spiderman (Australia.)
The choice of location really has to do with where the director believes is the best place to be.
I thought the shoji thing was a pretty good idea myself. Maybe lead-lined frosted glass would work? Some metal braces under the the wood and maybe make the front a door on a hinge to access the cdrom drive/etc.
Seriously, why does every case design done like this have to have a window and neon? I mean seriously guys, it has been done.
How about a wood case? How about a leather clad case to match your wife's purse? How about a faux fur case? How about a carpet case to match your floor? How about a Shoji-Screen type case? How about a pyramid case? A dice-colored case?
Or how about a case that doesn't slowly cook their users by emitting massive unshielded electromagnetic radiation?
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
To fill an Average family car with petrol in the UK costs £50 or $80 To fill the same car with petrol in the USA costs £15.07 or $24.11
It should be noted that half of the cost of gas in the UK is for taxes to pay for roads.
In the US, state taxes are used for the same thing, so we just shift it to other taxes.
My taxes in San Francisco are pretty insane; 8.5% sales tax, 40+% state/federal tax (ajustable), 25% parking tax, 1% property tax. Not to mention electricity tax, phone tax, death tax, birth tax, capital gains tax, business tax, water tax, taxi tax, and it goes on and on and on and on.
On the plus side we get to deduct interest payments for home mortgages from our income taxes.
When are we going to get some Ogg Vorbis-enabled DVD/CD Players? With Microsoft getting WMA integrated into DVD players and Xiph putting out Tremor not to mention all the MP3 integration being done, it seems these little companies like Apex would jump to add yet another feature to their players that would differentiate them in that cut-throat bargain basement market.
I've noticed a lot of SciFi's TV shows have ended and they have very few original shows now.
This brings up the question, what are they going to do with their budget?
I remember they turned down taking up Babylon 5 because of all the original programming they were doing. It sure would be interesting if they focused their money on another jms project.
Ultimately no security scheme based on commodity hardware is secure against a determined attack.
Rule #1: Security in an insecure environment is unobtainable.
Be it commodity hardware or not, there is no such thing as 'tamper-proof' hardware and given enough resources, the best tamper-resistant hardware can be reverse engineered.
The goal of a security system is to make the cost of breaking into it more expensive than what the system is securing.
I think DirecTV has done a pretty good job at raising the cost (time more than money) of breaking the system above what your average individual considers excessive.
Yes yes, and 99% of people use bongs for smoking pot and not tabacco.
What you may not realize is 1% is actually quite a big number when you are talking about 60 million users (600,000) or 500 million files (5,000,000.)
This is why Napster had such a hard time filtering. They had a system that could filter 99% of all copyrighted works accurately, but that last 1% represented a giant gaping hole.
BitKeeper does have one feature that I consider worth the price of development, simply because I haven't found it anywhere else. Each developer has a full-featured repository on their machine.
This means that you can get on a plane, disconnected from the world, start working on your laptop and commit, revert, branch, etc. Once you get back to an internet connection, you can easily sync back to the main repository and have all those lovely change messasges transferred with you.
Nokia is certainly not the first phone to operate on 3G. It isn't even the first phone to work on WCDMA 3G.
For those who don't know, the ITU defined a set of 3 CDMA-based standards for 3G; WCDMA, CDMA2000, and TD-SCDMA.
CDMA2000 services have been rolling out for quite some time. There are currently over 16 million subscribers (Korea alone accounts for 12 million and Japan with 2.14 million.) This is the standard rolling out in the US with SprintPCS and Verizon.
WCDMA on the other hand has very few users, on the order of 0.13 million.
Now, most CDMA2000 devices are 1x (low bandwidth first iteration.) Full blown 1xEV-DO (2 Mbps) devices were launched a while ago for the Korea market. These include LG LG-KH5000 in May 2002 and most recently the Samsung SCH-V300 launched in September 2002.
See 3G Today for a very extensive list of 3G devices.
Hell, I'll bet there's a lower percentage of Linux users pirating *any* Linux software than there are Windows users *pirating Microsoft Windows*! The only reason anyone pays is because MS does aggressive business audits and has OEM deals.
Speak for yourself buddy boy. Some of us pay for software because we want the company behind the software to continue to exist so they can do 24x7 onsite support.
Coming from a company that paid for Oracle on Linux (well over $60,000), I can assure you that companies have no problems paying for software on Linux.
Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks.
Actually they are pretty much identical to IP networks. Multihomed networks with varying speed connections have existed and for a long time.
Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend?
Stick a good amount of RAM and a decent CPU in your wireless device and call it a router. Then put in a vector routing protocol such as OSPF. Combine with a less memory intensive routing protocol for accessing nodes outside your MAN. Stir.
Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.
It may happy that going wireless the entire way there isn't as efficient as going wireless-to-wire-to-wireless. The only challenge in doing this is the fact your average home broadband connection doesn't include a routing table feed. This can be overcome, but it won't win any awards for efficiency.
The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.
The Internet is one giant partially-meshed network. No one said that these wireless networks would be fully-meshed. In fact, that's next to impossible unless they were within 100 meters of eachother.
Then there is the IRA that blows stuff up all the time as do Israeli zionists.
Damn, doesn't this country forget that most of the crime done in this country are actually done BY AMERICANS?
People seem to have forgotten that more than 15,000 people are murdered by Americans in the US every year.
I think what people must realize is federal government is run by a bunch of pansies who would forsake freedom for a temporary feeling of safety It doesn't help that our President lacks the crucial ability of actually being able to lead. I've seen stronger leaders in games of Quake.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Just a correction, Napster's peak user loan was 2.2 million simultaneous connections, not 1.5 million.
I'm not completely sure that Kazaa doesn't inflate their numbers (its fairly hard to get truly accurate counts of connections in a distirbuted network.)
I do realize that. But it bugged me when my HS teacher said it moved "instantaneous."
Your high school teacher may have been oversimplifying things. If an object was in fact perfectly rigid, then in fact, the effect would be instantaneous, but as I said before, there is a limit to the tensile strength of any material. Perfectly rigid multi-atom materials should not exist with our current understanding.
(OTOH, there's gravity, which is a whole different ball of wax...)
The current theory states that gravity also moves at the speed of light.
If suddently a massive object appeared in the middle of nowhere, the time it takes before objects around it were affected should be the speed of light.
Let's say, for example, that I've got a 1 AU (about 8 light-minitue) long indistructable rod and I'm out in space. I push the rod. Common sense says that the far tip of the rod moves at the same time I move the near tip. But that'd break the speed of light; forgetting about inertia for a moment, it'd take at least 8 minutes for the rod to move after I push the near end.
The end of the rod does not move instantaneously. Realize that each atom along the way has to collide into another atom all the way to the end before the end moves. This collision speed is less than the speed of light.
There is also an upper limit to tensile strength. If you were to take a long pole and swing it, it would snap before moving faster than the speed of light.
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DVB/S and DVB/T work very well for all other continents already. Why is it so hard to make it work for us here? Is it because of some sort of insatiable desire for HDTV that I've never actually seen?
There are a lot of reasons. First, the channel size in Europe is different than the US (8 MHz vs 6 MHz) which would make using identical technology impossible if we wanted to do a phased rollout.
Second, DVB is not considered by the FCC to be HDTV. The big thing is the whole interlaced non-square pixels thing at 4x3.
Third, ATSC is more efficient with the spectrum than DVB-T is. It requires less power to cover the same area (60% was the last number I heard.) Since a transmitter can cost upwards of $20,000 in electricity bills, that kind of savings is quite impressive.
And finally, the ability to run 4 channels on one 6 MHz block was attractive. It does generate some odd channels (2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3), but then so does radio.
Here are some comparisons:
DVB-T Aspect Ratio: 4x3
ATSC Aspect Ratio: 16x9
DVB-T Audio: MPEG-1 Audio
ATSC Audio: Dolby Digital AC-3
DVB-T Modulation: COFDM
ATSC Modulation: VSB
DVB-T Max Usable Bandwidth: 18.66 Mbps @ 5.7 MHz
ATSC Max Usable Bandwidth: 19.39 Mbps @ 5.38 MHz
DVB-T Max Resolution: 2048x1152
ATSC Max Resolution: 1920x1080
DVB-T Pixel Format: Interlaced/Non-square
ATSC Pixel Format: Mostly Progressive/Square
Now there are some negatives. ATSC has been shown to have some problems with multipath interference and also not suitable for mobile devices (for some reason this was a big concern.)
No, an airplane is not a glider with power (I'm talking about hang-gliders not modern thermal gliders which actually do share technology with airplanes.)
An airplane creates lift by creating a high pressure zone below its wing. This is done by creating more surface area below its wing vs. above and having air move along it (more air will pass above than below creating a high pressure area under its wing.)
A glider creates lift by creating a high pressure zone below its wing. This is done by having a large surface and falling. There are also gliders that create a high pressure area by thermals and of course, flying near a large mountain (ground-effect.)
I admit I have done this many times after interviewing people as a last check before hiring them. It is especially helpful when the perspective person is an active member of mailing lists that are archived on the web or on usenet for determining the technical skill of someone while they are doing something freelance such as linux kernel.
I imagine that this sort of thing will evolve into something a bit more formal, a Personal Information Agency (PIA) located offshore that maintains a database of everyone.
Companies could let them setup cameras in stores in return for having them do targeted marketing. Image recognition could be setup to determine who your friends are (who you are seen with on more than one occasion) and more!
Or not.
He was quoting a fictional grocery clerk. He must be mocking the grammar of grocery clerks everywhere for not knowing the word 'while'!
Seriously though, who cares. The editor obviously didn't correct it since it is somewhat intelligible, so why should you?
There are also people like me who rate things as a method of tracking what they've already seen/read/used.
I find Netflix's rating engine to be a perfect method of tracking what movies I've already seen so I don't go and accidentally rent the same one twice. This has led me to have an awful lot of ratings (~2000 DVDs), but I can be fairly confident that everything in my rental queue is new.
Of course, rating things (1-5 stars) is very different from reviewing something. Reviewing something requires you to think rather hard about what you liked or didn't like about a product and is usually done because you have a strong emotion about it and feel the need to tell the world about it. Rating something is so much easier that it can be done without much thought at all, making it much more common.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I fail to see how this is any less secure than burying fiber and placing big signs around it warning there is a fiber drop so someone with a backhoe doesn't accidentally dig it up. Even in a city where the cable is buried under the road, there are access points all over the place.
In fact, many of these robots are built to run cable in piping that is inaccessible to humans so they are *more* secure than running fiber next to train tracks or under roads.
A Chicago to New York maglev is an insteresting proposition. That 750 miles equates to 1200km, and at the discount price of only $19 million per kilometer (half of the "projected" cost in Germany), amounts to $28 trillion. ... We can get to Mars for a lot less.
That's $22.8 billion not $28 trillion. While $22.8 billion is a lot of money, it doesn't compare to road maintenance and highway patrol costs. The problem with Maglevs in such a populated area though is the number of stops.
In somewhere like California however, 350 miles between San Francisco and LA makes a lot of sense due to the cost of road maintenance, highway patrol, and the fact that it takes longer to board and leave the plane than it does to actually fly. Also because there is very little in central California anyone would want to stop for, so any stops could be very short or non-existant.
This is why I always thought the FCC should have licensed out an 80 MHz band to a particular technology that could be used by anyone rather than a specific class of devices that can all wreck havok with eachother using a mix of technologies.
It sure would have been nice if we had a cheap adaptive FHDSS system with a decent security layer.
Farscape is an American show filmed in Australia. It is produced by the Jim Henson company and Hallmark Entertainment for goodness sakes.
There are a whole lot of American shows that are not filmed in the United States, for instance Smallville (Canada), Survivor (all over the damn place) and of course all sorts of movies like The Matrix (Australia), Dark City (Australia), Spiderman (Australia.)
The choice of location really has to do with where the director believes is the best place to be.
I thought the shoji thing was a pretty good idea myself. Maybe lead-lined frosted glass would work? Some metal braces under the the wood and maybe make the front a door on a hinge to access the cdrom drive/etc.
Seriously, why does every case design done like this have to have a window and neon? I mean seriously guys, it has been done.
How about a wood case? How about a leather clad case to match your wife's purse? How about a faux fur case? How about a carpet case to match your floor? How about a Shoji-Screen type case? How about a pyramid case? A dice-colored case?
Or how about a case that doesn't slowly cook their users by emitting massive unshielded electromagnetic radiation?
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
To fill an Average family car with petrol in the UK costs £50 or $80
To fill the same car with petrol in the USA costs £15.07 or $24.11
It should be noted that half of the cost of gas in the UK is for taxes to pay for roads.
In the US, state taxes are used for the same thing, so we just shift it to other taxes.
My taxes in San Francisco are pretty insane; 8.5% sales tax, 40+% state/federal tax (ajustable), 25% parking tax, 1% property tax. Not to mention electricity tax, phone tax, death tax, birth tax, capital gains tax, business tax, water tax, taxi tax, and it goes on and on and on and on.
On the plus side we get to deduct interest payments for home mortgages from our income taxes.
When are we going to get some Ogg Vorbis-enabled DVD/CD Players? With Microsoft getting WMA integrated into DVD players and Xiph putting out Tremor not to mention all the MP3 integration being done, it seems these little companies like Apex would jump to add yet another feature to their players that would differentiate them in that cut-throat bargain basement market.
I've noticed a lot of SciFi's TV shows have ended and they have very few original shows now.
This brings up the question, what are they going to do with their budget?
I remember they turned down taking up Babylon 5 because of all the original programming they were doing. It sure would be interesting if they focused their money on another jms project.
Ultimately no security scheme based on commodity hardware is secure against a determined attack.
Rule #1: Security in an insecure environment is unobtainable.
Be it commodity hardware or not, there is no such thing as 'tamper-proof' hardware and given enough resources, the best tamper-resistant hardware can be reverse engineered.
The goal of a security system is to make the cost of breaking into it more expensive than what the system is securing.
I think DirecTV has done a pretty good job at raising the cost (time more than money) of breaking the system above what your average individual considers excessive.
Yes yes, and 99% of people use bongs for smoking pot and not tabacco.
What you may not realize is 1% is actually quite a big number when you are talking about 60 million users (600,000) or 500 million files (5,000,000.)
This is why Napster had such a hard time filtering. They had a system that could filter 99% of all copyrighted works accurately, but that last 1% represented a giant gaping hole.
BitKeeper does have one feature that I consider worth the price of development, simply because I haven't found it anywhere else. Each developer has a full-featured repository on their machine.
This means that you can get on a plane, disconnected from the world, start working on your laptop and commit, revert, branch, etc. Once you get back to an internet connection, you can easily sync back to the main repository and have all those lovely change messasges transferred with you.
Nokia is certainly not the first phone to operate on 3G. It isn't even the first phone to work on WCDMA 3G.
For those who don't know, the ITU defined a set of 3 CDMA-based standards for 3G; WCDMA, CDMA2000, and TD-SCDMA.
CDMA2000 services have been rolling out for quite some time. There are currently over 16 million subscribers (Korea alone accounts for 12 million and Japan with 2.14 million.) This is the standard rolling out in the US with SprintPCS and Verizon.
WCDMA on the other hand has very few users, on the order of 0.13 million.
Panasonic WCDMA device launched in September 2001 by NTT DoCoMo obviously beat this Nokia. NEC has a couple models launched in October 2001 for WCDMA as well.
Now, most CDMA2000 devices are 1x (low bandwidth first iteration.) Full blown 1xEV-DO (2 Mbps) devices were launched a while ago for the Korea market. These include LG LG-KH5000 in May 2002 and most recently the Samsung SCH-V300 launched in September 2002.
See 3G Today for a very extensive list of 3G devices.
Hell, I'll bet there's a lower percentage of Linux users pirating *any* Linux software than there are Windows users *pirating Microsoft Windows*! The only reason anyone pays is because MS does aggressive business audits and has OEM deals.
Speak for yourself buddy boy. Some of us pay for software because we want the company behind the software to continue to exist so they can do 24x7 onsite support.
Coming from a company that paid for Oracle on Linux (well over $60,000), I can assure you that companies have no problems paying for software on Linux.
Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks.
Actually they are pretty much identical to IP networks. Multihomed networks with varying speed connections have existed and for a long time.
Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend?
Stick a good amount of RAM and a decent CPU in your wireless device and call it a router. Then put in a vector routing protocol such as OSPF. Combine with a less memory intensive routing protocol for accessing nodes outside your MAN. Stir.
Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.
It may happy that going wireless the entire way there isn't as efficient as going wireless-to-wire-to-wireless. The only challenge in doing this is the fact your average home broadband connection doesn't include a routing table feed. This can be overcome, but it won't win any awards for efficiency.
The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.
The Internet is one giant partially-meshed network. No one said that these wireless networks would be fully-meshed. In fact, that's next to impossible unless they were within 100 meters of eachother.
Then there is the IRA that blows stuff up all the time as do Israeli zionists.
Damn, doesn't this country forget that most of the crime done in this country are actually done BY AMERICANS?
People seem to have forgotten that more than 15,000 people are murdered by Americans in the US every year.
I think what people must realize is federal government is run by a bunch of pansies who would forsake freedom for a temporary feeling of safety It doesn't help that our President lacks the crucial ability of actually being able to lead. I've seen stronger leaders in games of Quake.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Yes, but you see I was sitting watching the numbers on the load balancer at the time, so I think I know a little better than CNN. :)
Just a correction, Napster's peak user loan was 2.2 million simultaneous connections, not 1.5 million.
I'm not completely sure that Kazaa doesn't inflate their numbers (its fairly hard to get truly accurate counts of connections in a distirbuted network.)
I do realize that. But it bugged me when my HS teacher said it moved "instantaneous."
Your high school teacher may have been oversimplifying things. If an object was in fact perfectly rigid, then in fact, the effect would be instantaneous, but as I said before, there is a limit to the tensile strength of any material. Perfectly rigid multi-atom materials should not exist with our current understanding.
(OTOH, there's gravity, which is a whole different ball of wax...)
The current theory states that gravity also moves at the speed of light.
If suddently a massive object appeared in the middle of nowhere, the time it takes before objects around it were affected should be the speed of light.
Let's say, for example, that I've got a 1 AU (about 8 light-minitue) long indistructable rod and I'm out in space. I push the rod. Common sense says that the far tip of the rod moves at the same time I move the near tip. But that'd break the speed of light; forgetting about inertia for a moment, it'd take at least 8 minutes for the rod to move after I push the near end.
The end of the rod does not move instantaneously. Realize that each atom along the way has to collide into another atom all the way to the end before the end moves. This collision speed is less than the speed of light.
There is also an upper limit to tensile strength. If you were to take a long pole and swing it, it would snap before moving faster than the speed of light.