The site is up now, they are aiming at a minimum of 100kbps (and it seems they think they can get that from 5MHz of bandwidth with 100W of power over 100 miles). 100Kbps is a big improvement over modem speeds over poor quality phone lines (as long as there's not so much processing involved that it would raise the latency to unacceptable levels).
It's more like the files used in most streaming media players (e.g. RealPlayer) which are delivered by http and point to the 'real' file. A plugin (or helper app) would handle this fine (plugin being preferable, since it can auto-install).
The 12vdc ones are probably similar to the high-frequency electronic ballast available for mains voltage (inverter-based design). Flicker is reduced so it's easier on the eyes, and tube life is increased. Operated at the design voltage, less power is used for a given light output than conventional ballasts (though when supplied under-voltage, conventional ballasts usually fare better in this respect, a fact worth considering if the power supply is unreliable). Also most HF ballasts have greater EMI problems, you can't win in all respects, so you need to work out what's most important...
The lower-end cameras with a cheap fixed lens and without an LCD should probably be able to take rougher handling than the more expensive models, and given the cost of buying disposables, developing and printing, don't need to last *all* that long before they can start saving money (especially if you can buy them in bulk quantities!).
Or howabout a mobile phone with a built-in camera...
Agreed that RAM isn't all that reliable (in the face of e.g. gamma radiation), but any system using it for long-term storage would presumably be using a software-based error-correcting code on the data, and sweeping it fairly regularly so that only a small number of errors would be likely to occur before they can be corrected (te reduce the risk of data getting so corrupted that it can't be recovered).
EEPROM ("flash") isn't actually all that fast, it's useful because it's solid-state so isn't very likely to suffer from mechanical damage.
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl
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Foiling Cinema Pirates
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lame with one --alt-preset extreme does very well for me, but --alt-preset standard might well be good enough for most people. This does sound a little better than the r3mix settings to me.Certainly give me VBR over CBR of less than about 224k anyday...
Careful with quick_abort, it can be a hefty bandwidth-user if not tuned correctly. I wonder if copying updates to a local http server and using a redirector to rewrite specific URLs would be more useful...
None of those are UDP (which is what you really want in order to run NTP), otherwise I'd suggest just running your own ntpd on a non-standard port somewhere.
Maybe the ISP can be persuaded to operate their own timeserver behind the firewall (which they may be persuaded to do, since it's much better for security/audit purposes if all machines have accurate clocks), or allow access to one specific host.
GPS has already been mentioned, though possibly it would be difficult to get a reliable signal in some server rooms without an external antenna. Other radio-based options are available, for example MSF in the UK, DCF in much of W.Europe, or WWVB in N.America, all of which are a bit more likely to penetrate a server room than GPS.
Failing that, you could periodically connect to a webpage you trust to have fairly reliable time (obviously this is a much less accurate method, you probably wouldn't want to use this if you need accuracy better than a couple of seconds). Or assuming the firewall only looks at port numbers and doesn't inspect traffic, you could ssh out on e.g. the https port, and forward onto a normal time server.
The Orics were great with their EXPLODE, SHOOT, ZAP and PING commands and the built-in speaker...slight side-effect that those commands made it quite difficult to break the program, what a pity...;-)
And of course, if the wages were higher (as they might be if they had to support higher-priced entertainment), things like DVD players would cost a lot more in the USA, so fewer people would have them, which would seriously cut into MPAA members revenue...
Even ignoring the cost, Inmarsat's too high ~10km, the big thing that Teledesic had is that the latency is so much lower (pings in the region of 35ms rather than 350ms) which is the biggest problem with the current satellite internet access (DVB and VSAT).
There's an awful lot of terrestrial infrastructure that would need to be built to get even 10% of what Teledesic would offer.
I'll definitely agree with that. (Did you mean 'built in modules to log to and authenticate from MySQL' maybe? Although what you say is correct of course:-) Really flexible, and it's supplied supporting an amazing number of authentication sources. Helpful people too.
IDE-RAID with 3ware 7500-12 controllers and 3U 14-bay cases (available from rackmountpro, and probably others) could be one possibility, but I don't think you would get a 'flat' storage-space from it, probably have to be segmented instead. As others have pointed out NFS/Samba aren't really manageable ways to handle a filesystem spread amongst multiple machines. People who do this, like archive.org and google, have custom software to access the data stored on their machines. But it doesn't have to be that way forever...
I think iSCSI could give very interesting possibilities for open-source SANs using this type of hardware...maybe front-end servers which map requests as necessary to back-end servers holding the storage, you could have a rather nice fully-resilient highly-scalable system that way, which would just appear as another drive to a client machine, no NFS/SMB etc...
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The site is up now, they are aiming at a minimum of 100kbps (and it seems they think they can get that from 5MHz of bandwidth with 100W of power over 100 miles). 100Kbps is a big improvement over modem speeds over poor quality phone lines (as long as there's not so much processing involved that it would raise the latency to unacceptable levels).
It's more like the files used in most streaming media players (e.g. RealPlayer) which are delivered by http and point to the 'real' file. A plugin (or helper app) would handle this fine (plugin being preferable, since it can auto-install).
The 12vdc ones are probably similar to the high-frequency electronic ballast available for mains voltage (inverter-based design). Flicker is reduced so it's easier on the eyes, and tube life is increased. Operated at the design voltage, less power is used for a given light output than conventional ballasts (though when supplied under-voltage, conventional ballasts usually fare better in this respect, a fact worth considering if the power supply is unreliable). Also most HF ballasts have greater EMI problems, you can't win in all respects, so you need to work out what's most important...
Recording file access-times is probably a pretty bad idea, too.
The lower-end cameras with a cheap fixed lens and without an LCD should probably be able to take rougher handling than the more expensive models, and given the cost of buying disposables, developing and printing, don't need to last *all* that long before they can start saving money (especially if you can buy them in bulk quantities!). Or howabout a mobile phone with a built-in camera...
Agreed that RAM isn't all that reliable (in the face of e.g. gamma radiation), but any system using it for long-term storage would presumably be using a software-based error-correcting code on the data, and sweeping it fairly regularly so that only a small number of errors would be likely to occur before they can be corrected (te reduce the risk of data getting so corrupted that it can't be recovered).
EEPROM ("flash") isn't actually all that fast, it's useful because it's solid-state so isn't very likely to suffer from mechanical damage.
lame with one --alt-preset extreme does very well for me, but --alt-preset standard might well be good enough for most people. This does sound a little better than the r3mix settings to me.Certainly give me VBR over CBR of less than about 224k anyday...
Careful with quick_abort, it can be a hefty bandwidth-user if not tuned correctly. I wonder if copying updates to a local http server and using a redirector to rewrite specific URLs would be more useful...
No, but some NAT will let you split outgoing connections between two ISPs (iptables can, I think).
None of those are UDP (which is what you really want in order to run NTP), otherwise I'd suggest just running your own ntpd on a non-standard port somewhere. Maybe the ISP can be persuaded to operate their own timeserver behind the firewall (which they may be persuaded to do, since it's much better for security/audit purposes if all machines have accurate clocks), or allow access to one specific host. GPS has already been mentioned, though possibly it would be difficult to get a reliable signal in some server rooms without an external antenna. Other radio-based options are available, for example MSF in the UK, DCF in much of W.Europe, or WWVB in N.America, all of which are a bit more likely to penetrate a server room than GPS. Failing that, you could periodically connect to a webpage you trust to have fairly reliable time (obviously this is a much less accurate method, you probably wouldn't want to use this if you need accuracy better than a couple of seconds). Or assuming the firewall only looks at port numbers and doesn't inspect traffic, you could ssh out on e.g. the https port, and forward onto a normal time server.
They'll have to use better power supplies on the shop models if they're going to be pegged at 100% CPU all the time...
The Orics were great with their EXPLODE, SHOOT, ZAP and PING commands and the built-in speaker...slight side-effect that those commands made it quite difficult to break the program, what a pity... ;-)
And of course, if the wages were higher (as they might be if they had to support higher-priced entertainment), things like DVD players would cost a lot more in the USA, so fewer people would have them, which would seriously cut into MPAA members revenue...
Psion machines would be a good choice too. Fairly nice keyboards, good battery life, and small.
Lots of people have bought Zeus too, even with open-source free alternatives like Apache.
Read some of these mailing list posts for more information about Robert X. Cringely's article on passive repeaters...
There's an awful lot of terrestrial infrastructure that would need to be built to get even 10% of what Teledesic would offer.
I'll definitely agree with that. (Did you mean 'built in modules to log to and authenticate from MySQL' maybe? Although what you say is correct of course :-) Really flexible, and it's supplied supporting an amazing number of authentication sources. Helpful people too.
IDE-RAID with 3ware 7500-12 controllers and 3U 14-bay cases (available from rackmountpro, and probably others) could be one possibility, but I don't think you would get a 'flat' storage-space from it, probably have to be segmented instead. As others have pointed out NFS/Samba aren't really manageable ways to handle a filesystem spread amongst multiple machines. People who do this, like archive.org and google, have custom software to access the data stored on their machines. But it doesn't have to be that way forever...
I think iSCSI could give very interesting possibilities for open-source SANs using this type of hardware...maybe front-end servers which map requests as necessary to back-end servers holding the storage, you could have a rather nice fully-resilient highly-scalable system that way, which would just appear as another drive to a client machine, no NFS/SMB etc...
How are they going to get rid of their old stock if they let you do that?
This isn't in stock at the moment, but is meant for two 12"x13" dual Xeon boards with separate 350W PSUs for each board.
This won't do anything to hide an active network, people will just look at the data traffic instead of the beacons.
It'll probably stop Steve and Bill from stealing your service, though :-)