Actually, I suspect that the idiosyncratic similarities are more along the lines of IE5 Mac attempting to respond similarly to IE6 Win for quirks mode. Strict mode, on the other hand, is something else entirely, and IE5 Mac is in many ways a far superior CSS2 implementation than IE6 Win. If anything, IE5 Mac follows CSS2 more closely than just about any other browser - Firefox and Safari's implementations are much closer to CSS 2.1. This leads to some fairly unique behaviour on IE5 Mac's part where some of the more erroneous parts of CSS2 have been implemented quite strictly (width of floats springs to mind as an example).
Drawing a direct comparison between IE5 Mac and IE6 Win is therefore just not a correct thing to do - they are really quite different browsers in many ways, and testing a site in IE5 Mac is certainly no substitute for testing in IE6 Win in any circumstance.
Re:This sounds great but...
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IE7 Details Emerge
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, IE6 in strict mode, although still heinous, is reasonably good in terms of CSS. The box model is largely OK, although not entirely without faults. The floats model is still a bit buggered though, with various spurious margin bugs and soforth. Overall, IE6 in strict mode is sufficiently functional that cross-browser development is for the most part fairly straightforward, unlike IE6 in quirks mode, where the broken box model makes life hideously dificult.
If they can get strict mode cleaned up for IE7, sort out the doctype switching to allow for XML declarations, recognise the XHTML MIME type, and generally get the CSS implementation properly in line with CSS2.1, then things will be good.
I find it a little ironic that much of the CSS work has already been done within the Microsoft camp in the form of IE5 for the Mac, which in my experience has the most CSS2 compliant rendering engine of all the major browsers (excluding Opera, which I have practically no experience with). It's certainly the case that Gecko and KHTML lean much more towards the more practical CSS2.1, and sometimes oddities in CSS2 can actually spring the odd surprise in their manifestation within IE5 Mac.
I believe the only place you can currently get fast connectivity to Sunsite is within the DoC network. I've used the mirror outside the DoC but within college, and have had disappointing performance (vs mirror.ac.uk, for example). I understand that the current bandwidth situation will be improved soon, though. Also, I would hope that ICT and the DoC can sort out their routing, it really shouldn't be dificult at all to make Sunsite internally accessible to college.
At least Sunsite is back, though. I remember physically seeing the kit in the DoC a while back, but we still had a long wait before it came online.
A good number of USB webcams should work out of the box if you're running a decent stock kernel from your distro (i.e. suitable modules are pre-compiled and ready to use). Others have binary drivers only. Unfortunately there is no USB device class for video devices, so webcam implementation is probably not as solid as most linux USB support. A detailed list of supported devices can be found at http://www.linux-usb.org/devices.html
The loss of mirror.ac.uk cannot be underestimated. It is by fair the fastest, cleanest, and most complete mirror site I've ever used. It will be sorely missed.
It looks like I'll have to turn my/etc/apt/sources.list to point to Sunsite Northern Europe instead. Hosted by the Department of Computing at Imperial College, it was down for a prolonged period while the service was being rebuilt. It is now back up and claims to be ready for use. Doing a test transfer inside the college network, I don't seem to be getting much more than around 270kBps throughput, and I always got much better results from mirror.ac.uk, but they may still be ironing out some problems.
At Imperial College, London we're using WMV for the student television's video distribution, and picking it up quite happily with mplayer on a linux box. Our choice of video format has a lot to do with the fact that college's main multicasting relay server is windows media.
The radio station uses ogg vorbis as it's primary distribution medium, although we have mp3 streams available too. We're using our own streaming software in place of icecast2, and are looking to be able to multicast with it natively. We may eventually build video support in too, which would likely pave the way for ogg theora, I guess:-)
Phil Stewart
Media Group Honorary Secretary, Imperial College Union
Even keyboards have a finite life-span though.I'd be the first to admit I'm a bit heavy on keyboards, but I was a little surprised when after using a particularly shoddy old thing on one of the office boxes at my college radio station for a while, I actually managed to break it.
I hit the big return key and it kinda went, well, down further than it should've done, and at an angle that surely isn't normal. Closer inspection shows that the key had sheared off where it's stub joins into the key switch.
Ironically, I'd only ordered a whole bunch of new keyboards just half-an-hour previously, and worse still they haven't arrived yet. Doh!
Of all the deepcut lines, the Picadilly Line is probably the most fascinating for abandoned stations.
There are three notable abandonments; Aldwych, Down Street, and Brompton Road. There are also abandoned sections at Hyde Park Corner (which no longer uses it's original surface building, which is now a Pizza Restaurant), Green Park, South Ken (the lift shafts are empty), Caledonian Road, and no doubt several other stations.
Aldwych is probably the best known of the abandoned stations. It was closed in 1994 as the replacement cost for the lifts was deemed uneconomical, given the usage the station got. Aldwych runs on a branch down from Oldborn, and some tunnel extends further. This is because the Picadilly line was originally two seperate lines, the western section running to Covent Garden, the northern section running to Aldwych. The northern section was intended to run south of the river, hence the extra tunnel. This was never completed though, and the two sections wer joined at Holborn very early on.
Aldwych also has other random tunnel going to it, as the Jubilee line was built all the way to Aldwych, but never used that far. Now the Charring Cross section of the Jubilee line is completely abandoned as the Jubilee extension takes the line through Westminster instead.
Down Street was closed in the 1930s along with Brompton Road to thin down the number of Central London stations on the Picadilly line when the line was extended further east and west. Down Street, due to it's proximity to Green Park, was never a particularly busy station, and hence was an easy target. During the war it was converted into a transport command HQ and government bunker.
Brompton Road was likely chosen for closure due its very high proximity to South Ken - much of the surface building still stands next to the Kensington Oratory, just a few minutes walk away. Brompton Road was also used during the war, although it's uses were entirely military, and somewhat murky. The military still own the shafts, making access from the ground impossible. Several years ago a man died after breaking in and falling down one of the shafts. His remains were not discovered for quite some time!
Both Brompton Road and Down Street can be spotted from passing tube trains - the platforms were bricked up during their war usage, so you can see where the platforms would be by looking where the tube wall turns into a brick wall. Brompton Road is between South Ken and Knightsbridge, Down Street is between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park. Also look out for the cross-over / passing tunnels between Hyde Park Corner and Down Street:-)
I admin about half-a-dozen or so systems, which include a couple of servers, a couple of office machines, and couple of audio production / broadcast machines.
There seems to be a number of Fujitsu drives in use in my systems, and I've recently experienced a half-failure of one of these drives (it's dying a slow slow death, making odd noises and gently developing bad sectors). Fortunately it's only the system drive of one of the office boxes, so is not really critical. I am concerned about the drives in the other machines though.
Personally, I've only ever experienced two drive failures: one was caused by me dropping a drive on its side, thus inducing a head crash (oops:o) ), the other was an old 1.2gig Seagate that had had a good innings, so I didn't mind too much.
My greater concern in recent times has been with fan failure. In particular, I've personally had problems with fans on slot CPUs (old Slot A Athlons, P-IIs, stuff like that and of that vintage). Slot A fans are particularly awkward, since it so dificult to find replacement heatsinks nowadays (yes, I brutalised the heatsink when removing it from the CPU, no, I didn't think of just replacing the fan til afterwards...). I've also seen fan failure on recent socket CPUs and graphics card GPU heatsinks (one of my flatmates had a Geforce 2MX go manky after the fan started to knacker itself).
This is a problem that is only going to get worse, as we start to have to put fans on more and more components and bigger fans in place of existing ones. I have seen systems that have three case fans, a GPU fan, a chipset fan, two hd fans, and one brick of a CPU fan. Perhaps a tad overkill, but before too long this is just going to be a necessary setup in high-performance machines that aren't externally cooled (i.e. air conditioned), which is just about any system not in a cool room or well conditioned office. Heck, what are we to do in a couple of years time, liquid-nitrogen cool everything?
If someone drinks all the beer at a party, isn't it the responsibilty for someone to go out and buy more beer?
If one person drank all the beer at a party then *they* would be responsible for going out and buying more (or get booted out for being greedy and drinking all the beer). Anyway, it is customary to take some beer/food/alcohol/whatever along when you go to a party, so everyone has a good time.
Why don't they just offer unlimited, and buy more bandwidth as needed?
Can't possibly work. However much bandwidth is made available can and *will* be used. Trust me, I admin computers connected to a network with a pipe of 100Mbps full-duplex uncontended bandwidth, and I fully appreciate how much I could download (I also fully appreciate what will happen if I abuse it heavily, so I just enjoy the occasional couple of hundred meg 5 min download:-)
To extend your beer analogy, offering unlimitted bandwidth is like buying more and more alcohol for your party go-ers to guzzle for ever ad-infinitum, which just ever doesn't happen, although it would be good if it did:-)
This brings up an interesting note on ISPs. Why do broadband companies cap bandwidth at all? Why not just divide up the available bandwidth evenly among all the requesting users. Lets say that there's a 100 users and that the ISP can offer 100MB/s of bandwidth total.
The fundamental problem with this is that you have a *huge* mismatch between customer bandwidth demand and the sizr of the ISP's pipe. Uncontended bandwidth costs a big heap of cash (at least this side of the pond it does...), and in reality to bring the cost to a reasonable level the supply of bandwidth is contended between many customers. This sharing of bandwidth relies on sensible packet routing strategies so that people can benefit in burst activity (such as web browsing, mail, etc), and still get reasonable bandwidth on downloads.
You ask: why cap at all? Indeed, if people are sharing bandwidth anyway, why not uncap and let everyone take what they can get? The problem is that there are always going to be people who will eat as much bandwidth as they can get and then some. Capping prevents those people from taking the entire bandwidth through shear quantity of connections.
Wherever or not the extreme tactics employed in this instance are called for is another matter entirely though...
I do want more control over my system. But how the hell am I supposed to learn Debian if I can't install Debian?
Well this is how I learned Debian (and still am...)
1. Learn linux 2. Become minor sysadmin for a Debian server or two. 3. Work out how to make apt do things.
Debian really is a server distro. It's rock-solid, and easy to maintain. It's a bitch to install, and I have no idea how well Gnome / X, etc all work (I'll soon find out). I would *much* rather have a nice fresh Debian install on my NAT box though, as apposed to the knackered old heavily-abused and somewhat mutant, broken excuse for Suse that I currently have there:-)
I know the question is being asked from the US, but I'm guessing there are/.ers in the UK who'd want to know about this kinda thing too, especially with the future possibilities of Access Radio opening up the airwaves to more non-profit organisations.
In order to set up a small scale radio station in the UK (or indeed anywhere else), there are number of things that you need:
People: A radio station needs a number of people to operate. You really can't just go it alone. You need people to present, you need people with technical knowledge to build and maintain some sort of studio, as well as know how to operate broadcast equipment. You need people to deal with the financial side of things, you need people to deal with record companies and other such outside organisations. In the student scenario, it is probably best to establish a society whose goal is to create a fully operational student radio station, which puts some basic organisational mechanics in place and provides a focus for all students interested in the enterprise.
Backing: All small scale radio ventures will need some sort of backing, both financial and in terms of general support. In the student case, this will likely be the student's union, who need to be persuaded to cough up at least some of the money needed, and help deal with issues like mounting antenna on buildings, and finding a suitable location for setting up a studio.
Licensing: Once you have people and backing, you need a license. In the UK, the Radio Authority is responsible for licensing all types of radio station. Small scale stations can currently apply for the various Restricted Service Licenses available, typically short-term (one month) FM licenses or long-term Low Power AM licenses. You need to research the different license available and decide which one suits you best. Music that is to be played on air also has to be licensed, both by PPL for record company royalties and PRS for artist royalites. Music licensing is dependent on the profit/turnover of a station as well as the type of broadcast license it holds, so music licensing should be a consideration in working out these factors.
Equipment: This is the expensive bit. A radio station will need some sort of studio from which to broadcast, which will minimally need CD players, a minidisc player (for jingles, trails, call signs, pre-recorded material, interviews, etc), a microphone, and a mixer to bring it all together. For short-term licenses it may be practical to hire out a complete kit. Long-term stations will need to investigating buying or building various of the bits needed. Equipment extends beyond the studio though. A transmitter will also be required, and intermediate kit between studio and transmitter will also be required. Places that specialise in radio studio and broadcast equipment include Alice and Radica. Canford also sell a huge range of audio and related equipment, from CD decks to rack bolts and everything in-between.
Content: Once a radio station has all the people, support, licensing, and equipment it needs to get off the ground, the final vital component is the content itself. Some of this needs to be obtained, for example a predominantly music-based station will need to obtain CDs to play on air (although music licensing does mean you can use your own CDs, as long as they are not pirated, afaik). Other content will have to be created, such as jingles, trails, call signs (the bits that say 'This is EnterStationNameHere broadcasting on SomeFrequency' which must be broadcast every fifteen minutes by law). Another major problem faced by small-scale stations is being able to provide round-the-clock broadcasts and being able to provide news content. IRN can provide the news (I forget the url, it's nearly 4 in the morning:-| ), however the option persued by most student radio stations in the UK is SBN, who provide overnight sustain programming as well as hourly news bulletins.
Well, I've tried to cover most the issues that a small radio station has to deal with, although none of them in particularly much detail. There's a whole lot more to it, and it does involve a fair whack of work, but it is great great fun, and I thoroughly recommend getting involved in projects like this to anyone who has the opportunity. I started out presenting a show at my college radio in my first year at uni, in my second year my involvement mushroomed. Now, as I approach third year (in about a week:-) ), we are poised on doing a spectacular outside broadcast, I'm running round like a headless chicken trying to make sure things work, and we look set to gain a big influx of Freshers to help the continuation of our station for many years to come.
What more can I say. It's nearly 4 in the morning nd I'm about to drop off to sleep, so I think I'll stop here. Hope I've given y'all some useful info to chew on:-)
Phil Stewart
RSL Development Officer, IT Manager, Library Manager, Presenter, and Random Bod at IC Radio, the student radio station of Imperial College, London.
Oh yeah, and occasionally I study for my degree:-)
go get a laser pointer... shine it on your hand for a week... let me know when it get's hot... Try to at least know what you are talking about....
Well I do know that an hour-long CD that has just been played through is at least a bit warmer when it comes out of a CD player than when it went in, and CDs are designed to use reflected laser light as a means of pickup. Vinyl is not designed as such, and hence potential heating problems are a valid concern. Obviously since laser vinyl systems exist, the problem has been satisfactorily got round, but I personally would want to know the potential side effects if I were ever to invest in such a system.
Yuo have your tracking weight wrong... and finally a linear tracking turntable does fin and has cince 1978.... I think they figured that out already with silly things like manufacturing specifications.
Don't be so patronising, I do know how to set up a deck. I'm a friggin DJ for heavens sake, and if anything I keep the weight biased towards the cart for the very purpose of keeping the needle in the groove, cos when scratching to queue the track you really don't want the needle to jump all over the place. Yes, that will wear the vinyl more quickly, but the vinyl I use is pressed for that purpose and can stand up to the abuse.
In this particular instance the record in question was so warped that the crest of the warp was fully half-an-inch above the platter at least, which took the cart way higher than it should ever go in normal circumstances. It had been stored at an angle with a large quantity of CDs piled on top, which is what caused it to warp so bad in the first place. I'm just glad the record wasn't mine:-) (and no, it wasn't me who stored it badly either).
Of course, you haven't quite accounted for the fact that the real high-end turntables tend to be laser based and that serious and rich audiophiles buy them. Perhaps their ears aren't quite as good as yours.
Yeah, but 'audiophiles' sometimes have more money than sense - you have to question spending hundreds of pounds/dollars/whatever on super-duper interconnects which are still, at the end of the day, unbalanced:-)
That aside, I have serious questions about both scanning and laser systems. In laser systems, how do you get round the problem of heat? Lasers are going to make records at least slightly hot, even if the beam is focused on a paticular area only for a very short time. To be honest, I'd be far more dubious about the effects of heat damage than the effects of physical needle damage if I were considering buying an optical deck.
Also, how do laser decks deal with tracking? Particularly given all the mess that can go wrong with vinyl, such as scratches, dents, warping (major issue for any pick-up system - I once tried to play a record that was so warped that the cart launched itself into the air at the crest of the warp:-) ), and more subtle problems such as pressing misalignment, which causes a lot of lateral movement of the cart which results in audible warble (*very* annoying)
These problems are all going to be far worse on any kind of scanning system, cos you're going to have to design the data extraction algorithms to compensate for all these problems. Mis-pressed vinyl should be fairly straightforward, just recalculate a new centre referrence point, but warping is going to be a massive problem, as this shifts the groove around in all kinds of weird directions, and is going to make the actual scanning a bit of a pain.
Presumably laser pickups have got round the warping issue, which may give helping clues to any kind of scanning system. That may help the scanning system algorithms discern the actual groove, but getting any information out of them, well that's another kettle of fish altogether.
1.1 is still a very immature version, compared to the Internet Explorer family of technologies, which is currently in version 6.x and still being improved daily.
Worthless comparison. On a feature comparison level, Mozilla is at least on-par if not ahead of IE. As far as stability goes, Mozilla seems to be hanging in there, I've had very few problems with 1.0; most problems seem to occur when trying to deal with sites that are designed to work with broken Microsoft oddities. Not that all such oddities necessarily persist in IE today, but such things can cause problems with any modern browser.
When will Mozilla feature speedier web browsing, and better integration with best-of-breed Microsoft products such as MSN messenger and Outlook XP?
As far as day-to-day browsing is concerned, I've found that Mozilla is nearly as fast, if not faster; the bulk of the time used with Mozilla is the initial loading time, as the code is self contained rather than heavily integrated with other parts of the desktop environment. It is partly due to this that my X/Gnome environment loads considerably more quickly than reaching my desktop when logging on to Windows from the logon prompt.
As for "best-of-breed" products such as MSN Messenger and Outlook XP? Well, there are plenty of other messenger clients out there for both Windows and Linux, and I don't see why Mozilla should make it a priority to integrate these things. It is possible that Chatzilla, Mozilla's IRC client, will support more of the IM protocols in the future, or that IM will be supported outside of Chatzilla in an independent implementation. We'll see what we get by 2.0.
Concerning Outlook XP, Mozilla does come with it's own e-mail client, don't forget. I don't use it myself, but I expect it is mature enough to do the job. Remember there's only so much an e-mail client has to do at the end of the day. I use Pine, which is entirely console based, and it does pretty much everything I need it to.
A theme that more closely matches the award winning Windows look-and-feel would also be helpful.
Maybe so, and possibly someone out there is going to write one (in fact, looking at one of the websites that the 'Get New Themes' option suggested, it appears somebody already has made an IE theme). However, do excuse me if I express a preference for the default scheme. It may not be very prettified, but it does integrate very well with my MicroGUI-themed Gnome environment:-)
I tend to agree. I did watch (and yes, enjoy) DS9 and Voyager, but both went downhill towards the end, and did have pretty sucky endings. Voyager really overdid the Borg stuff. Like majorly. Neither of the two have ever been as good as TNG.
IMO Enterprise's biggest failing is Captain Archer. He lacks any kind of credibility, and is the biggest reason why I can't be bothered to watch the show. I've watched some, but they've mostly just been recycled plot lines that have just sucked more.
Don't get me wrong, some of the concepts and ideas in Enterprise are actually pretty interesting, I just think that the series (from what I've seen) could be a whole lot better. Particularly without Archer.
But like I said, even logging 'transactional' traffic, like what e-mails you've sent, what sites you've been to, what irc channels you lurk in, etc is *still* going to burn far too much storage space. Plus the overhead of archiving this information in any kind of usable fashion is going to require extra procesing burden and suchlike.
Anyway, if you didn't log all data, then the whole system could blow back in the faces of investigators. Imagine someone being in e-mail contact with a terrorist suspect, say, who just happens to be a friend from school. The police might accuse them of conspiracy, citing the e-mail transactions. But if the content of that e-mail isn't logged then the police can't prove squat - said person could claim that they were merely catching up on old times. If both parties were sensible enough to delete and shred their copies of the e-mails at the time, then two years later after constant abuse of the disk sectors those e-mails occupied will have (very likely) irretrievably destroyed that data, and the police are left asking the politicians why they didn't enforce a stricter achiving scheme:-)
More fundamentally, it is my understanding that (and I may well be wrong) that the 1998 Data Protection Act was revised from the original act to generally be updated where appropriate and become compliant with the relevant EU directive on Data Protection. So any new EU directive concerning data retention would not only be fudged at the UK level (kinda surpassable) but would also conflict with an earlier EU directive, which would be a bit messy.
Not that it really matters - this whole process is massively unfeasible. To put it in context, my flatmates and I have easily downloaded over a quarter of a terabyte of data over the last year over our ADSL line - the figure probably reaches much higher. Scale this up across the continent and the figures are going to get unrealistically enormous. Even just logging e-mail and dns activity is going to burn a heck of a lot of storage capacity.
What are the EU going to do? Spend many billions of euros on implementing the required software and (more fundamentally) hardward changes across the continent, money they could be spending on, for example flood relief? Or will they just tell the ISPs to get on with it, leaving them fundamentally crippled with the cost of internet access skyrocketing as ISPs drop like flies?
Obligatory post
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LinuXbox Boots
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· Score: -1, Redundant
It has to be done:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those...
A Beowulf cluster of XBoxs is actually a thought as scarey as it is funny imo.
As a maths undergrad at Imperial College London, I always thought those students lurking in the darker areas of the building known as the Department of Computing were pretty hardcore geeks.
How neive of me to think that their counterparts across the pond couldn't stoop to even lower levels...
Also since this thing is sick and evil anyway, they really should've gone the whole hog and used red LEDs in the eyes for that evil Terminator effect.
A Flatmate and I came up with the idea of sending information by gravity fluctuations, which we think should transmit data instantaneously. But short of dipping control rods in and out of a very big nuclear reactor, we can't think of how this could be achieved.
Furthermore, one of us is a pure mathematician and the other an elec eng attempt, so neither of us has a clue about the physics, although we suspect quantum physics probably breaks everything in our cunning little scheme:-)
You wouldn't necessarily need to send a probe to determine whether a planet is habitable though. By observing the planet through a (very very big) telescope you would be able to work out it's mass and density (from its orbital behaviour and parent star), and the composition of its atmosphere through spectroscopy.
OK, so you might not know anything much for sure, but it's worth a shot. Although the planet might blow up before you get there, or it might turn out to be inhabitted by huge slobbery dinosaur-type creatures, or have sentient inhabitants that capture the weird alien vessel that is Earth Colonial I and perform exotic experiments on the attempted colonists - an act denied by the all-powerful United States of Alpha-Centauri government - which would then become the basis for a hit conspiracy-theory series about some renegade government low-life in a desperate search for The Truth That Is Out There...
URGENT - Go to http://users.skynet.be/dark.angel/cool.htm
I went, but Mozilla crashed on accessing the site so I wasn't affected. Then I got a clone message, and the evil purpose rapdily became clear. Anyone peaked at this to see if the code is essentially the same?
Slashdot Mirror
Drawing a direct comparison between IE5 Mac and IE6 Win is therefore just not a correct thing to do - they are really quite different browsers in many ways, and testing a site in IE5 Mac is certainly no substitute for testing in IE6 Win in any circumstance.
Actually, IE6 in strict mode, although still heinous, is reasonably good in terms of CSS. The box model is largely OK, although not entirely without faults. The floats model is still a bit buggered though, with various spurious margin bugs and soforth. Overall, IE6 in strict mode is sufficiently functional that cross-browser development is for the most part fairly straightforward, unlike IE6 in quirks mode, where the broken box model makes life hideously dificult.
If they can get strict mode cleaned up for IE7, sort out the doctype switching to allow for XML declarations, recognise the XHTML MIME type, and generally get the CSS implementation properly in line with CSS2.1, then things will be good.
I find it a little ironic that much of the CSS work has already been done within the Microsoft camp in the form of IE5 for the Mac, which in my experience has the most CSS2 compliant rendering engine of all the major browsers (excluding Opera, which I have practically no experience with). It's certainly the case that Gecko and KHTML lean much more towards the more practical CSS2.1, and sometimes oddities in CSS2 can actually spring the odd surprise in their manifestation within IE5 Mac.
I believe the only place you can currently get fast connectivity to Sunsite is within the DoC network. I've used the mirror outside the DoC but within college, and have had disappointing performance (vs mirror.ac.uk, for example). I understand that the current bandwidth situation will be improved soon, though. Also, I would hope that ICT and the DoC can sort out their routing, it really shouldn't be dificult at all to make Sunsite internally accessible to college.
At least Sunsite is back, though. I remember physically seeing the kit in the DoC a while back, but we still had a long wait before it came online.
A good number of USB webcams should work out of the box if you're running a decent stock kernel from your distro (i.e. suitable modules are pre-compiled and ready to use). Others have binary drivers only. Unfortunately there is no USB device class for video devices, so webcam implementation is probably not as solid as most linux USB support. A detailed list of supported devices can be found at http://www.linux-usb.org/devices.html
The loss of mirror.ac.uk cannot be underestimated. It is by fair the fastest, cleanest, and most complete mirror site I've ever used. It will be sorely missed.
It looks like I'll have to turn my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Sunsite Northern Europe instead. Hosted by the Department of Computing at Imperial College, it was down for a prolonged period while the service was being rebuilt. It is now back up and claims to be ready for use. Doing a test transfer inside the college network, I don't seem to be getting much more than around 270kBps throughput, and I always got much better results from mirror.ac.uk, but they may still be ironing out some problems.
At Imperial College, London we're using WMV for the student television's video distribution, and picking it up quite happily with mplayer on a linux box. Our choice of video format has a lot to do with the fact that college's main multicasting relay server is windows media.
The radio station uses ogg vorbis as it's primary distribution medium, although we have mp3 streams available too. We're using our own streaming software in place of icecast2, and are looking to be able to multicast with it natively. We may eventually build video support in too, which would likely pave the way for ogg theora, I guess :-)
Phil Stewart
Media Group Honorary Secretary, Imperial College Union
Even keyboards have a finite life-span though.I'd be the first to admit I'm a bit heavy on keyboards, but I was a little surprised when after using a particularly shoddy old thing on one of the office boxes at my college radio station for a while, I actually managed to break it.
I hit the big return key and it kinda went, well, down further than it should've done, and at an angle that surely isn't normal. Closer inspection shows that the key had sheared off where it's stub joins into the key switch.
Ironically, I'd only ordered a whole bunch of new keyboards just half-an-hour previously, and worse still they haven't arrived yet. Doh!
Of all the deepcut lines, the Picadilly Line is probably the most fascinating for abandoned stations.
There are three notable abandonments; Aldwych, Down Street, and Brompton Road. There are also abandoned sections at Hyde Park Corner (which no longer uses it's original surface building, which is now a Pizza Restaurant), Green Park, South Ken (the lift shafts are empty), Caledonian Road, and no doubt several other stations.
Aldwych is probably the best known of the abandoned stations. It was closed in 1994 as the replacement cost for the lifts was deemed uneconomical, given the usage the station got. Aldwych runs on a branch down from Oldborn, and some tunnel extends further. This is because the Picadilly line was originally two seperate lines, the western section running to Covent Garden, the northern section running to Aldwych. The northern section was intended to run south of the river, hence the extra tunnel. This was never completed though, and the two sections wer joined at Holborn very early on.
Aldwych also has other random tunnel going to it, as the Jubilee line was built all the way to Aldwych, but never used that far. Now the Charring Cross section of the Jubilee line is completely abandoned as the Jubilee extension takes the line through Westminster instead.
Down Street was closed in the 1930s along with Brompton Road to thin down the number of Central London stations on the Picadilly line when the line was extended further east and west. Down Street, due to it's proximity to Green Park, was never a particularly busy station, and hence was an easy target. During the war it was converted into a transport command HQ and government bunker.
Brompton Road was likely chosen for closure due its very high proximity to South Ken - much of the surface building still stands next to the Kensington Oratory, just a few minutes walk away. Brompton Road was also used during the war, although it's uses were entirely military, and somewhat murky. The military still own the shafts, making access from the ground impossible. Several years ago a man died after breaking in and falling down one of the shafts. His remains were not discovered for quite some time!
Both Brompton Road and Down Street can be spotted from passing tube trains - the platforms were bricked up during their war usage, so you can see where the platforms would be by looking where the tube wall turns into a brick wall. Brompton Road is between South Ken and Knightsbridge, Down Street is between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park. Also look out for the cross-over / passing tunnels between Hyde Park Corner and Down Street :-)
I admin about half-a-dozen or so systems, which include a couple of servers, a couple of office machines, and couple of audio production / broadcast machines.
There seems to be a number of Fujitsu drives in use in my systems, and I've recently experienced a half-failure of one of these drives (it's dying a slow slow death, making odd noises and gently developing bad sectors). Fortunately it's only the system drive of one of the office boxes, so is not really critical. I am concerned about the drives in the other machines though.
Personally, I've only ever experienced two drive failures: one was caused by me dropping a drive on its side, thus inducing a head crash (oops :o) ), the other was an old 1.2gig Seagate that had had a good innings, so I didn't mind too much.
My greater concern in recent times has been with fan failure. In particular, I've personally had problems with fans on slot CPUs (old Slot A Athlons, P-IIs, stuff like that and of that vintage). Slot A fans are particularly awkward, since it so dificult to find replacement heatsinks nowadays (yes, I brutalised the heatsink when removing it from the CPU, no, I didn't think of just replacing the fan til afterwards ...). I've also seen fan failure on recent socket CPUs and graphics card GPU heatsinks (one of my flatmates had a Geforce 2MX go manky after the fan started to knacker itself).
This is a problem that is only going to get worse, as we start to have to put fans on more and more components and bigger fans in place of existing ones. I have seen systems that have three case fans, a GPU fan, a chipset fan, two hd fans, and one brick of a CPU fan. Perhaps a tad overkill, but before too long this is just going to be a necessary setup in high-performance machines that aren't externally cooled (i.e. air conditioned), which is just about any system not in a cool room or well conditioned office. Heck, what are we to do in a couple of years time, liquid-nitrogen cool everything?
From the bottom of the ebay auction page:
A functioning cockpit can be installed, based on the Microsoft Flight Simulator. This is offered by a third party and is in the $10,000 area.
Um. Says it all really ...
If someone drinks all the beer at a party, isn't it the responsibilty for someone to go out and buy more beer?
If one person drank all the beer at a party then *they* would be responsible for going out and buying more (or get booted out for being greedy and drinking all the beer). Anyway, it is customary to take some beer/food/alcohol/whatever along when you go to a party, so everyone has a good time.
Why don't they just offer unlimited, and buy more bandwidth as needed?
Can't possibly work. However much bandwidth is made available can and *will* be used. Trust me, I admin computers connected to a network with a pipe of 100Mbps full-duplex uncontended bandwidth, and I fully appreciate how much I could download (I also fully appreciate what will happen if I abuse it heavily, so I just enjoy the occasional couple of hundred meg 5 min download :-)
To extend your beer analogy, offering unlimitted bandwidth is like buying more and more alcohol for your party go-ers to guzzle for ever ad-infinitum, which just ever doesn't happen, although it would be good if it did :-)
This brings up an interesting note on ISPs. Why do broadband companies cap bandwidth at all? Why not just divide up the available bandwidth evenly among all the requesting users. Lets say that there's a 100 users and that the ISP can offer 100MB/s of bandwidth total.
The fundamental problem with this is that you have a *huge* mismatch between customer bandwidth demand and the sizr of the ISP's pipe. Uncontended bandwidth costs a big heap of cash (at least this side of the pond it does ...), and in reality to bring the cost to a reasonable level the supply of bandwidth is contended between many customers. This sharing of bandwidth relies on sensible packet routing strategies so that people can benefit in burst activity (such as web browsing, mail, etc), and still get reasonable bandwidth on downloads.
You ask: why cap at all? Indeed, if people are sharing bandwidth anyway, why not uncap and let everyone take what they can get? The problem is that there are always going to be people who will eat as much bandwidth as they can get and then some. Capping prevents those people from taking the entire bandwidth through shear quantity of connections.
Wherever or not the extreme tactics employed in this instance are called for is another matter entirely though ...
I do want more control over my system. But how the hell am I supposed to learn Debian if I can't install Debian?
Well this is how I learned Debian (and still am ...)
1. Learn linux
2. Become minor sysadmin for a Debian server or two.
3. Work out how to make apt do things.
Debian really is a server distro. It's rock-solid, and easy to maintain. It's a bitch to install, and I have no idea how well Gnome / X, etc all work (I'll soon find out). I would *much* rather have a nice fresh Debian install on my NAT box though, as apposed to the knackered old heavily-abused and somewhat mutant, broken excuse for Suse that I currently have there :-)
I know the question is being asked from the US, but I'm guessing there are /.ers in the UK who'd want to know about this kinda thing too, especially with the future possibilities of Access Radio opening up the airwaves to more non-profit organisations.
In order to set up a small scale radio station in the UK (or indeed anywhere else), there are number of things that you need:
People: A radio station needs a number of people to operate. You really can't just go it alone. You need people to present, you need people with technical knowledge to build and maintain some sort of studio, as well as know how to operate broadcast equipment. You need people to deal with the financial side of things, you need people to deal with record companies and other such outside organisations. In the student scenario, it is probably best to establish a society whose goal is to create a fully operational student radio station, which puts some basic organisational mechanics in place and provides a focus for all students interested in the enterprise.
Backing: All small scale radio ventures will need some sort of backing, both financial and in terms of general support. In the student case, this will likely be the student's union, who need to be persuaded to cough up at least some of the money needed, and help deal with issues like mounting antenna on buildings, and finding a suitable location for setting up a studio.
Licensing: Once you have people and backing, you need a license. In the UK, the Radio Authority is responsible for licensing all types of radio station. Small scale stations can currently apply for the various Restricted Service Licenses available, typically short-term (one month) FM licenses or long-term Low Power AM licenses. You need to research the different license available and decide which one suits you best. Music that is to be played on air also has to be licensed, both by PPL for record company royalties and PRS for artist royalites. Music licensing is dependent on the profit/turnover of a station as well as the type of broadcast license it holds, so music licensing should be a consideration in working out these factors.
Equipment: This is the expensive bit. A radio station will need some sort of studio from which to broadcast, which will minimally need CD players, a minidisc player (for jingles, trails, call signs, pre-recorded material, interviews, etc), a microphone, and a mixer to bring it all together. For short-term licenses it may be practical to hire out a complete kit. Long-term stations will need to investigating buying or building various of the bits needed. Equipment extends beyond the studio though. A transmitter will also be required, and intermediate kit between studio and transmitter will also be required. Places that specialise in radio studio and broadcast equipment include Alice and Radica. Canford also sell a huge range of audio and related equipment, from CD decks to rack bolts and everything in-between.
Content: Once a radio station has all the people, support, licensing, and equipment it needs to get off the ground, the final vital component is the content itself. Some of this needs to be obtained, for example a predominantly music-based station will need to obtain CDs to play on air (although music licensing does mean you can use your own CDs, as long as they are not pirated, afaik). Other content will have to be created, such as jingles, trails, call signs (the bits that say 'This is EnterStationNameHere broadcasting on SomeFrequency' which must be broadcast every fifteen minutes by law). Another major problem faced by small-scale stations is being able to provide round-the-clock broadcasts and being able to provide news content. IRN can provide the news (I forget the url, it's nearly 4 in the morning :-| ), however the option persued by most student radio stations in the UK is SBN, who provide overnight sustain programming as well as hourly news bulletins.
Well, I've tried to cover most the issues that a small radio station has to deal with, although none of them in particularly much detail. There's a whole lot more to it, and it does involve a fair whack of work, but it is great great fun, and I thoroughly recommend getting involved in projects like this to anyone who has the opportunity. I started out presenting a show at my college radio in my first year at uni, in my second year my involvement mushroomed. Now, as I approach third year (in about a week :-) ), we are poised on doing a spectacular outside broadcast, I'm running round like a headless chicken trying to make sure things work, and we look set to gain a big influx of Freshers to help the continuation of our station for many years to come.
What more can I say. It's nearly 4 in the morning nd I'm about to drop off to sleep, so I think I'll stop here. Hope I've given y'all some useful info to chew on :-)
Phil Stewart
RSL Development Officer, IT Manager, Library Manager, Presenter, and Random Bod at IC Radio, the student radio station of Imperial College, London.
Oh yeah, and occasionally I study for my degree :-)
go get a laser pointer... shine it on your hand for a week... let me know when it get's hot... Try to at least know what you are talking about....
Well I do know that an hour-long CD that has just been played through is at least a bit warmer when it comes out of a CD player than when it went in, and CDs are designed to use reflected laser light as a means of pickup. Vinyl is not designed as such, and hence potential heating problems are a valid concern. Obviously since laser vinyl systems exist, the problem has been satisfactorily got round, but I personally would want to know the potential side effects if I were ever to invest in such a system.
Yuo have your tracking weight wrong... and finally a linear tracking turntable does fin and has cince 1978.... I think they figured that out already with silly things like manufacturing specifications.
Don't be so patronising, I do know how to set up a deck. I'm a friggin DJ for heavens sake, and if anything I keep the weight biased towards the cart for the very purpose of keeping the needle in the groove, cos when scratching to queue the track you really don't want the needle to jump all over the place. Yes, that will wear the vinyl more quickly, but the vinyl I use is pressed for that purpose and can stand up to the abuse.
In this particular instance the record in question was so warped that the crest of the warp was fully half-an-inch above the platter at least, which took the cart way higher than it should ever go in normal circumstances. It had been stored at an angle with a large quantity of CDs piled on top, which is what caused it to warp so bad in the first place. I'm just glad the record wasn't mine :-) (and no, it wasn't me who stored it badly either).
Of course, you haven't quite accounted for the fact that the real high-end turntables tend to be laser based and that serious and rich audiophiles buy them. Perhaps their ears aren't quite as good as yours.
Yeah, but 'audiophiles' sometimes have more money than sense - you have to question spending hundreds of pounds/dollars/whatever on super-duper interconnects which are still, at the end of the day, unbalanced :-)
That aside, I have serious questions about both scanning and laser systems. In laser systems, how do you get round the problem of heat? Lasers are going to make records at least slightly hot, even if the beam is focused on a paticular area only for a very short time. To be honest, I'd be far more dubious about the effects of heat damage than the effects of physical needle damage if I were considering buying an optical deck.
Also, how do laser decks deal with tracking? Particularly given all the mess that can go wrong with vinyl, such as scratches, dents, warping (major issue for any pick-up system - I once tried to play a record that was so warped that the cart launched itself into the air at the crest of the warp :-) ), and more subtle problems such as pressing misalignment, which causes a lot of lateral movement of the cart which results in audible warble (*very* annoying)
These problems are all going to be far worse on any kind of scanning system, cos you're going to have to design the data extraction algorithms to compensate for all these problems. Mis-pressed vinyl should be fairly straightforward, just recalculate a new centre referrence point, but warping is going to be a massive problem, as this shifts the groove around in all kinds of weird directions, and is going to make the actual scanning a bit of a pain.
Presumably laser pickups have got round the warping issue, which may give helping clues to any kind of scanning system. That may help the scanning system algorithms discern the actual groove, but getting any information out of them, well that's another kettle of fish altogether.
1.1 is still a very immature version, compared to the Internet Explorer family of technologies, which is currently in version 6.x and still being improved daily.
Worthless comparison. On a feature comparison level, Mozilla is at least on-par if not ahead of IE. As far as stability goes, Mozilla seems to be hanging in there, I've had very few problems with 1.0; most problems seem to occur when trying to deal with sites that are designed to work with broken Microsoft oddities. Not that all such oddities necessarily persist in IE today, but such things can cause problems with any modern browser.
When will Mozilla feature speedier web browsing, and better integration with best-of-breed Microsoft products such as MSN messenger and Outlook XP?
As far as day-to-day browsing is concerned, I've found that Mozilla is nearly as fast, if not faster; the bulk of the time used with Mozilla is the initial loading time, as the code is self contained rather than heavily integrated with other parts of the desktop environment. It is partly due to this that my X/Gnome environment loads considerably more quickly than reaching my desktop when logging on to Windows from the logon prompt.
As for "best-of-breed" products such as MSN Messenger and Outlook XP? Well, there are plenty of other messenger clients out there for both Windows and Linux, and I don't see why Mozilla should make it a priority to integrate these things. It is possible that Chatzilla, Mozilla's IRC client, will support more of the IM protocols in the future, or that IM will be supported outside of Chatzilla in an independent implementation. We'll see what we get by 2.0.
Concerning Outlook XP, Mozilla does come with it's own e-mail client, don't forget. I don't use it myself, but I expect it is mature enough to do the job. Remember there's only so much an e-mail client has to do at the end of the day. I use Pine, which is entirely console based, and it does pretty much everything I need it to.
A theme that more closely matches the award winning Windows look-and-feel would also be helpful.
Maybe so, and possibly someone out there is going to write one (in fact, looking at one of the websites that the 'Get New Themes' option suggested, it appears somebody already has made an IE theme). However, do excuse me if I express a preference for the default scheme. It may not be very prettified, but it does integrate very well with my MicroGUI-themed Gnome environment :-)
I tend to agree. I did watch (and yes, enjoy) DS9 and Voyager, but both went downhill towards the end, and did have pretty sucky endings. Voyager really overdid the Borg stuff. Like majorly. Neither of the two have ever been as good as TNG.
IMO Enterprise's biggest failing is Captain Archer. He lacks any kind of credibility, and is the biggest reason why I can't be bothered to watch the show. I've watched some, but they've mostly just been recycled plot lines that have just sucked more.
Don't get me wrong, some of the concepts and ideas in Enterprise are actually pretty interesting, I just think that the series (from what I've seen) could be a whole lot better. Particularly without Archer.
But like I said, even logging 'transactional' traffic, like what e-mails you've sent, what sites you've been to, what irc channels you lurk in, etc is *still* going to burn far too much storage space. Plus the overhead of archiving this information in any kind of usable fashion is going to require extra procesing burden and suchlike.
Anyway, if you didn't log all data, then the whole system could blow back in the faces of investigators. Imagine someone being in e-mail contact with a terrorist suspect, say, who just happens to be a friend from school. The police might accuse them of conspiracy, citing the e-mail transactions. But if the content of that e-mail isn't logged then the police can't prove squat - said person could claim that they were merely catching up on old times. If both parties were sensible enough to delete and shred their copies of the e-mails at the time, then two years later after constant abuse of the disk sectors those e-mails occupied will have (very likely) irretrievably destroyed that data, and the police are left asking the politicians why they didn't enforce a stricter achiving scheme :-)
More fundamentally, it is my understanding that (and I may well be wrong) that the 1998 Data Protection Act was revised from the original act to generally be updated where appropriate and become compliant with the relevant EU directive on Data Protection. So any new EU directive concerning data retention would not only be fudged at the UK level (kinda surpassable) but would also conflict with an earlier EU directive, which would be a bit messy.
Not that it really matters - this whole process is massively unfeasible. To put it in context, my flatmates and I have easily downloaded over a quarter of a terabyte of data over the last year over our ADSL line - the figure probably reaches much higher. Scale this up across the continent and the figures are going to get unrealistically enormous. Even just logging e-mail and dns activity is going to burn a heck of a lot of storage capacity.
What are the EU going to do? Spend many billions of euros on implementing the required software and (more fundamentally) hardward changes across the continent, money they could be spending on, for example flood relief? Or will they just tell the ISPs to get on with it, leaving them fundamentally crippled with the cost of internet access skyrocketing as ISPs drop like flies?
It has to be done:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those ...
A Beowulf cluster of XBoxs is actually a thought as scarey as it is funny imo.
Score -1, Redundant
As a maths undergrad at Imperial College London, I always thought those students lurking in the darker areas of the building known as the Department of Computing were pretty hardcore geeks.
...
How neive of me to think that their counterparts across the pond couldn't stoop to even lower levels
Also since this thing is sick and evil anyway, they really should've gone the whole hog and used red LEDs in the eyes for that evil Terminator effect.
--
From Phil
A Flatmate and I came up with the idea of sending information by gravity fluctuations, which we think should transmit data instantaneously. But short of dipping control rods in and out of a very big nuclear reactor, we can't think of how this could be achieved.
:-)
Furthermore, one of us is a pure mathematician and the other an elec eng attempt, so neither of us has a clue about the physics, although we suspect quantum physics probably breaks everything in our cunning little scheme
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From Phil
You wouldn't necessarily need to send a probe to determine whether a planet is habitable though. By observing the planet through a (very very big) telescope you would be able to work out it's mass and density (from its orbital behaviour and parent star), and the composition of its atmosphere through spectroscopy.
...
OK, so you might not know anything much for sure, but it's worth a shot. Although the planet might blow up before you get there, or it might turn out to be inhabitted by huge slobbery dinosaur-type creatures, or have sentient inhabitants that capture the weird alien vessel that is Earth Colonial I and perform exotic experiments on the attempted colonists - an act denied by the all-powerful United States of Alpha-Centauri government - which would then become the basis for a hit conspiracy-theory series about some renegade government low-life in a desperate search for The Truth That Is Out There
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From Phil
The version I got reads
URGENT - Go to http://users.skynet.be/dark.angel/cool.htm
I went, but Mozilla crashed on accessing the site so I wasn't affected. Then I got a clone message, and the evil purpose rapdily became clear. Anyone peaked at this to see if the code is essentially the same?
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From Phil