I remember reading some time ago about someone here in Sweden who ordered a "detailed" bill from his/her telco, not knowing it would include every GPRS connection. The phone in question was set to check for new email every 5min so the bill ended up being over 300 pages long! In fact it was so big that it had to be retreived at the local post office - it was too large to fit in the mail box.
The icing on the cake thought was that the telco (Tele2) was at the time running a big advertising campaign with the slogan "The company that brings you small bills.":) Of course, even though the bill itself was over 300 pages, the charge was only something like 60kr (about $9). Probably less than the postage fee for the bill...
Actually, you can turn it off. I have a 160gb sata deskstar flashed with different firmware. No meow-sounds att all:)
It's not official though, and I can't seem to find a link to it anymore. Try googling a bit. I think someone said you can mail their customer support and ask for it too.../ushac
I thought KDDI had introduced flat-rate? According to this article they have.
Here in Sweden it's all per packet charge. I personally pay about $1/Mb for my 3G data. Although I can stream 128kbit sound to my phone, those tariffs prohobits it for more proof of concept...:(
IIRC the dielectric strength of air is ~3kV/mm, which means you would need about 60 megavolts.
Regards / ushac
Re:Solution to low battery and hover problems
on
Micro Air Vehicles
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but how much equipment can they actually carry? How many hummingbirds would you need to be able to carry, oh let's say, a coconut? And are you referring to an African or a European... ah never mind.
Here's a spec sheet from Samsung (this is for PC memory though - the 500Mhz variety I was refering to is for graphics cards). I quote: "200 MHz fCK for 400Mb/sec/pin & 267MHz fCK for 533Mb/sec/pin". That DDRII is quad pumped is a very wide spread misconception. It might have come from the increase in minimum burst from 2 to 4, or someone said something about the memory array being multiplexed by four but the bus by two. I don't know, but anyway - Double Data Rate II memory still "only" has double the data rate of the clock frequency.
DDR-II isn't quad pumped - it's dual just like "ordinary" DDR. The changes are more to allow it to be clocked higher. For instance, Samsung is coming out with a DDR-II chip clocked at amazing 500Mhz (think DDR1000) in Q3 if I remeber it correctly. With that memory and a 256bit bus (which most rumors says it has) it would mean ~32GB/s. Of course, Radeon 9700 also has support for DDR-II (there are just not enough memory chips available yet) - they could possibly release a refresh to counter act the NV30. As some muse, perhaps even with a.13u die shrink.
According to this article someone linked to below,
"In the Bee Line network MMS messages were successfully transferred from one phone to another, also 7650, but an attempt to send an MMS to the SonyEricsson T68i failed, because the phones have different capabilities in displaying images, i.e. they are incompatible on this level."
Um. Maybe I'm just stupid, but something looks a little odd to me. On the second image on the page they have pictures from five different views. That includes on looking at the bottom and one at the top of the phone. The silhouettes in those two pictures are completely different! How did they do that?! Or isn't it the top and bottom? This is the image by the way.
There's a "law" proposed by computer graphics pioneer James Blinn (the inventor of stuff like Blinn-shading and if I remember correctly, bump-mapping). Blinn's law states that rendering time is constant - throw more computing power at artists and they will swollow it up by adding more stuff and better quality rendering techniques.
So ILM an Co will probably always have a rendering fram taking at least a few minutes per frame to do the job. Relatime hardware-accelerated programmable shaders will still have use at effects houses for realtime previewing though. Cg and other high-lever realtime shader languages will help bring that technology closer to the artists.
OK, so let's say a pc with a GeForceXXX can actually do all the operations needed for a big effects house's rendering pipeline - only that it doesn't run anywhere near "realtime" speed... That piece of hardware should certeinly be faster than a general purpose CPU - couldn't you just cluster a bunch of pcs with such gfx cards? Possibly. I doesn't seems as if it is going all that über-great for Advanced Rendering Technology (www.art-render.com) though - they make ray tracing acceleration hardware that accepts Renderman files. Seems to be a great idea to me, but I haven't seen much of it being used at big effects houses... But check it out, it's really neat!:)
The VPen is also nice, but they don't really do the same thing. The VPen is really more like a stylus pen (but for writing on regular surfaces) or a mouse.
The Anoto pen requires some special paper - but in return it generates absolute coordinates (rather than relative for the VPen). It also works as a regular pen so you actually write/draw things on paper with it. You don't even need a screen! The Anoto pen is also interesting in that there will (hopefully) be some interesting services connected to it - not just email/fax/sms etc. For instance you could imagine ticking off a box next to a program description in your tv guide - and just like that your PVR is programmed to record it.:)
Maybe I'll wait a few generations though. It's kind of bulky as it is right now. They're working on reducing the number of chips which will make it smaller, cheaper and increase battery life.
It's sill a problem. The 3G networks, or even 2.5G (EDGE, GPRS, etc) offers bandwith enough to play decent quality music. The problem is the cost.
The new packet based systems charge on a data download basis as opposed to the old per minute charge. This is great news for WAP, SMS and other small text-based things. Here in Sweden the biggest mobile operator Telia charges about 2 cents per Kb for GPRS, so reading som e-mails, broswing some news via WAP or whatever won't cost you much and you don't have to hurry as you did with the 50 cents/min charge over GSM. But with high bandwith features like audio the picture is quite different.
At 32kbit/s (which offers quite poor audio) you're downloading 4 Kbyte/s. That's 8 cents per second, or $4.80/min. That's a little hefty for me thank you very much... A more efficient codec could really save you some bucks.
I think I'll wait till 3G is widely available and not horribly overpriced. I'm hoping it won't be that many years. Streaming from monkeyradio.org directly to my handset would be really neat:)
Actually, 8495 SEK = ~$813 USD, and Expert ain't the cheapest place around either. Still, it's rather hefty. Sweden overall isn't a very cheap when it comes to electronics. I don't know if the fact that Nokia comes from our neighbour country Finland helps the price in the right direction. I'd guess not, since it's probably manufactured in Taiwan or something anyway.
Because it's a tad inconvenient to wander in darkness around the clock? Remember that a the poles you've got midnight sun and polar night taken to the extremes. The sun is up for six months in a row then down the rest of the year.
As for the origin of the word itself, I was told at a visit to an old castle outside of Stockholm, Skokloster Slott, that it comes from a set of unwritten laws of how to behave when drinking.
Long ago each person didn't have his/her own glass, there was one big cup that was passed around the table. You could not drink to little (you had to show respect and drink what was offered) and not to much (so there would be enough for everyone). Thus the word is formed from the words "lag" which mean roughly "team, group" and "om" which in this case means "around". You drank enough to make the cup go once around the table. In Swedish, "laget om / laget runt".
Well, for wireless connectivity I guess you could always buy one of those NotAllThatCheap Bluetooth modules that plugs in to the SD or CF slots. They're like $150-200 now. Strange price concidering the low cost of the chips. I think I read the other day at eetimes or so that bluetooth chips are now $5 a pop...
Never understimate the power of the placebo-effect! I used to think all formats sounded like crap at 128kbit, but I guess I was fooling myself.
The other day I did a blind test comparing wav, mp3, mp3PRO, ogg, wma and acc. Since my speakers aren't all that good, and the acuostics of my room are less then perfect, I use a set of nice headphones connected to my EWS64XL soundcard. I tested with a few different songs, both classical and "modern". I converted the a wav to all the formats at 64, 96, 128 and 160kbit (except for mp3pro which I could only encode at 64 and 96kbit and acc at 64, 96 and 128), and then back again to wavs (so buffering delays won't reveal what I'm listening to). Then I made a playlist of them in winamp and randomized it. I put pieces of paper on my monitor so I could only see which number in the playlist I was listening to and then tried to guess what I was listening to.
My conclusion was that if a good encoder was used for MP3 (I used LAME at highest quality settings) I could tell that it was compressed about half of the times at 128kbit. At 96 and 64kbit it always sounded awful, and at 160kbit I could never tell it from the original.
I was really impressed with ogg. It has been tremendously improved with rc2! I could actually not tell which was wich at either 128 or 160 kbit, and about 50/50 at 96kbit! Ogg was also the format that took the crown at 64kbit. I would say 64kbit ogg is really enjoyablem, at least with less than perfect equipment. The default bitrate in the oggdrop encoder seems to be 80kbit. I guess that's a good choice.
WMA sounded better than mp3 at 64 and 96kbit, but I could actually tell more wma 128kbit's from the original than mp3s. I couldn't tell the original from 160kbit wmas though. The encoding scheme of wma seems to be quite different from the others. There seems to be less "compression-sounds" but it is as bad as some others at buchering the comes through. When few sounds are heard (a single violin for example) it sound really good at 96 (and quite nice at 64kbit too), but as soon as lots of sounds at a wide frequency range appears (such as big symphony orchestra chord), it sounds as if it is doing rough low-pass filtering or something. Really nasty.
MP3Pro sounded worse than wma with the violin but better with the orchestra, at both 64 and 96 kbit. I could always tell them from the original though.
ACC is as good as (possibly slightly better than) MP3 at 128kbit, about as good as mp3pro at 96kbit, but really bad at 64kbit. This could have been due to a bad encoder though. Sounded like it did lots of low-pass filtering.
Overall, I'd say ogg is the winner. I now encode all my music with ogg at 128kbit. I'm eagerly awating ogg 1.0!
Just out of curiosity, which isp excatly is it that's offering that? What areas is the service available in? I'm not personally in need of a new connection as I'm on the 10Mbit student network here in Linköping. I'm just curious.
A friend of mine living near Stockholm recently got a 10mbit line from bredbandsbolaget for ~$20/month. That's _very_ nice for a commercial service!
I think many use SGI Onyx systems for HDTV mastering and compositing work for movies. They have a bandwith of 11.2Gb/s for the entire system (at least the "smaller" Onyx 3200 variety) and have an HDTV I/O board that uses their XIO bus at 2.4Gb/s (also available for the Octane workstation). Check out this page.
Regards / ushac
Slashdot Mirror
How about... Google Photos? :)
I remember reading some time ago about someone here in Sweden who ordered a "detailed" bill from his/her telco, not knowing it would include every GPRS connection. The phone in question was set to check for new email every 5min so the bill ended up being over 300 pages long! In fact it was so big that it had to be retreived at the local post office - it was too large to fit in the mail box.
:) Of course, even though the bill itself was over 300 pages, the charge was only something like 60kr (about $9). Probably less than the postage fee for the bill...
The icing on the cake thought was that the telco (Tele2) was at the time running a big advertising campaign with the slogan "The company that brings you small bills."
Actually, you can turn it off. I have a 160gb sata deskstar flashed with different firmware. No meow-sounds att all :)
/ushac
It's not official though, and I can't seem to find a link to it anymore. Try googling a bit. I think someone said you can mail their customer support and ask for it too...
I thought KDDI had introduced flat-rate? According to this article they have.
:(
/ushac
Here in Sweden it's all per packet charge. I personally pay about $1/Mb for my 3G data. Although I can stream 128kbit sound to my phone, those tariffs prohobits it for more proof of concept...
IIRC the dielectric strength of air is ~3kV/mm, which means you would need about 60 megavolts.
Regards / ushac
Yes, but how much equipment can they actually carry? How many hummingbirds would you need to be able to carry, oh let's say, a coconut? And are you referring to an African or a European... ah never mind.
Regards / ushac
Here's a spec sheet from Samsung (this is for PC memory though - the 500Mhz variety I was refering to is for graphics cards). I quote: "200 MHz fCK for 400Mb/sec/pin & 267MHz fCK for 533Mb/sec/pin". That DDRII is quad pumped is a very wide spread misconception. It might have come from the increase in minimum burst from 2 to 4, or someone said something about the memory array being multiplexed by four but the bus by two. I don't know, but anyway - Double Data Rate II memory still "only" has double the data rate of the clock frequency.
Regards / ushac
DDR-II isn't quad pumped - it's dual just like "ordinary" DDR. The changes are more to allow it to be clocked higher. For instance, Samsung is coming out with a DDR-II chip clocked at amazing 500Mhz (think DDR1000) in Q3 if I remeber it correctly. With that memory and a 256bit bus (which most rumors says it has) it would mean ~32GB/s. Of course, Radeon 9700 also has support for DDR-II (there are just not enough memory chips available yet) - they could possibly release a refresh to counter act the NV30. As some muse, perhaps even with a .13u die shrink.
Regards / ushac
Now that really sucks
Regards / ushac
Um. Maybe I'm just stupid, but something looks a little odd to me. On the second image on the page they have pictures from five different views. That includes on looking at the bottom and one at the top of the phone. The silhouettes in those two pictures are completely different! How did they do that?! Or isn't it the top and bottom? This is the image by the way.
Nice review though!
Regards / ushac
There's a "law" proposed by computer graphics pioneer James Blinn (the inventor of stuff like Blinn-shading and if I remember correctly, bump-mapping). Blinn's law states that rendering time is constant - throw more computing power at artists and they will swollow it up by adding more stuff and better quality rendering techniques.
:)
So ILM an Co will probably always have a rendering fram taking at least a few minutes per frame to do the job. Relatime hardware-accelerated programmable shaders will still have use at effects houses for realtime previewing though. Cg and other high-lever realtime shader languages will help bring that technology closer to the artists.
OK, so let's say a pc with a GeForceXXX can actually do all the operations needed for a big effects house's rendering pipeline - only that it doesn't run anywhere near "realtime" speed... That piece of hardware should certeinly be faster than a general purpose CPU - couldn't you just cluster a bunch of pcs with such gfx cards? Possibly. I doesn't seems as if it is going all that über-great for Advanced Rendering Technology (www.art-render.com) though - they make ray tracing acceleration hardware that accepts Renderman files. Seems to be a great idea to me, but I haven't seen much of it being used at big effects houses... But check it out, it's really neat!
Regards / ushac
The VPen is also nice, but they don't really do the same thing. The VPen is really more like a stylus pen (but for writing on regular surfaces) or a mouse.
:)
The Anoto pen requires some special paper - but in return it generates absolute coordinates (rather than relative for the VPen). It also works as a regular pen so you actually write/draw things on paper with it. You don't even need a screen! The Anoto pen is also interesting in that there will (hopefully) be some interesting services connected to it - not just email/fax/sms etc. For instance you could imagine ticking off a box next to a program description in your tv guide - and just like that your PVR is programmed to record it.
Maybe I'll wait a few generations though. It's kind of bulky as it is right now. They're working on reducing the number of chips which will make it smaller, cheaper and increase battery life.
Regards / ushac
How about pen and paper? :)
Regards / ushac
Wow, that's really neat. I wonder how good the results of this is compared to say van Eck phreaking (eavsdropping on the EMI emitted by the CRT-gun)?
Regards / ushac
It's sill a problem. The 3G networks, or even 2.5G (EDGE, GPRS, etc) offers bandwith enough to play decent quality music. The problem is the cost.
:)
The new packet based systems charge on a data download basis as opposed to the old per minute charge. This is great news for WAP, SMS and other small text-based things. Here in Sweden the biggest mobile operator Telia charges about 2 cents per Kb for GPRS, so reading som e-mails, broswing some news via WAP or whatever won't cost you much and you don't have to hurry as you did with the 50 cents/min charge over GSM. But with high bandwith features like audio the picture is quite different.
At 32kbit/s (which offers quite poor audio) you're downloading 4 Kbyte/s. That's 8 cents per second, or $4.80/min. That's a little hefty for me thank you very much... A more efficient codec could really save you some bucks.
I think I'll wait till 3G is widely available and not horribly overpriced. I'm hoping it won't be that many years. Streaming from monkeyradio.org directly to my handset would be really neat
Regards / ushac
Actually, 8495 SEK = ~$813 USD, and Expert ain't the cheapest place around either. Still, it's rather hefty. Sweden overall isn't a very cheap when it comes to electronics. I don't know if the fact that Nokia comes from our neighbour country Finland helps the price in the right direction. I'd guess not, since it's probably manufactured in Taiwan or something anyway.
Regards / ushac
Because it's a tad inconvenient to wander in darkness around the clock? Remember that a the poles you've got midnight sun and polar night taken to the extremes. The sun is up for six months in a row then down the rest of the year.
Regards / ushac
Hahaha! :)
As for the origin of the word itself, I was told at a visit to an old castle outside of Stockholm, Skokloster Slott, that it comes from a set of unwritten laws of how to behave when drinking.
Long ago each person didn't have his/her own glass, there was one big cup that was passed around the table. You could not drink to little (you had to show respect and drink what was offered) and not to much (so there would be enough for everyone). Thus the word is formed from the words "lag" which mean roughly "team, group" and "om" which in this case means "around". You drank enough to make the cup go once around the table. In Swedish, "laget om / laget runt".
Regards / ushac
This sounds like the Swedish Visby corvette, built by Kockums. They also make subs, most notably Australias Collins class diesel subs. Regards / ushac
Well, for wireless connectivity I guess you could always buy one of those NotAllThatCheap Bluetooth modules that plugs in to the SD or CF slots. They're like $150-200 now. Strange price concidering the low cost of the chips. I think I read the other day at eetimes or so that bluetooth chips are now $5 a pop...
Regards / Erik Språng
Never understimate the power of the placebo-effect! I used to think all formats sounded like crap at 128kbit, but I guess I was fooling myself.
The other day I did a blind test comparing wav, mp3, mp3PRO, ogg, wma and acc. Since my speakers aren't all that good, and the acuostics of my room are less then perfect, I use a set of nice headphones connected to my EWS64XL soundcard. I tested with a few different songs, both classical and "modern". I converted the a wav to all the formats at 64, 96, 128 and 160kbit (except for mp3pro which I could only encode at 64 and 96kbit and acc at 64, 96 and 128), and then back again to wavs (so buffering delays won't reveal what I'm listening to). Then I made a playlist of them in winamp and randomized it. I put pieces of paper on my monitor so I could only see which number in the playlist I was listening to and then tried to guess what I was listening to.
My conclusion was that if a good encoder was used for MP3 (I used LAME at highest quality settings) I could tell that it was compressed about half of the times at 128kbit. At 96 and 64kbit it always sounded awful, and at 160kbit I could never tell it from the original.
I was really impressed with ogg. It has been tremendously improved with rc2! I could actually not tell which was wich at either 128 or 160 kbit, and about 50/50 at 96kbit! Ogg was also the format that took the crown at 64kbit. I would say 64kbit ogg is really enjoyablem, at least with less than perfect equipment. The default bitrate in the oggdrop encoder seems to be 80kbit. I guess that's a good choice.
WMA sounded better than mp3 at 64 and 96kbit, but I could actually tell more wma 128kbit's from the original than mp3s. I couldn't tell the original from 160kbit wmas though. The encoding scheme of wma seems to be quite different from the others. There seems to be less "compression-sounds" but it is as bad as some others at buchering the comes through. When few sounds are heard (a single violin for example) it sound really good at 96 (and quite nice at 64kbit too), but as soon as lots of sounds at a wide frequency range appears (such as big symphony orchestra chord), it sounds as if it is doing rough low-pass filtering or something. Really nasty.
MP3Pro sounded worse than wma with the violin but better with the orchestra, at both 64 and 96 kbit. I could always tell them from the original though.
ACC is as good as (possibly slightly better than) MP3 at 128kbit, about as good as mp3pro at 96kbit, but really bad at 64kbit. This could have been due to a bad encoder though. Sounded like it did lots of low-pass filtering.
Overall, I'd say ogg is the winner. I now encode all my music with ogg at 128kbit. I'm eagerly awating ogg 1.0!
Well, just my thoughts.
Regards / ushac
Just out of curiosity, which isp excatly is it that's offering that? What areas is the service available in? I'm not personally in need of a new connection as I'm on the 10Mbit student network here in Linköping. I'm just curious.
A friend of mine living near Stockholm recently got a 10mbit line from bredbandsbolaget for ~$20/month. That's _very_ nice for a commercial service!
Regards / Erik Språng
I think many use SGI Onyx systems for HDTV mastering and compositing work for movies. They have a bandwith of 11.2Gb/s for the entire system (at least the "smaller" Onyx 3200 variety) and have an HDTV I/O board that uses their XIO bus at 2.4Gb/s (also available for the Octane workstation). Check out this page. Regards / ushac