They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage
But not the most important requirment. Amongst the most important requirements is that the system should be able to perform all the tasks it needs to, faultlessly and reliably.
The shuttle avionics exist and survive in one of the harshest environments available. The suffer heavy vibration and heavy radiation compared to other avionics such as used in military jets. More modern avionics are less suited to survive either.
Having a lighter faster computer that needs more radiation shielding to ensure reliable operation does not gain you much.
The flight system in the shuttle was fully capable of flying the craft when it was first launched, and until proved otherwise it remains fully capable of doing the job.
Why replace an avionics system that has returned the craft without fault over a hundred times, with one that never has? Do you have any idea the cost and development time of developing 5 multiple redundant intrinsically safe mission computers is likely to be - and is replacing a functioning avionics system at such a cost a good use of budget that could be better spent on science?
They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate... additional computation power might be helpful
The limiting factor of any avionics system is the response rate of the air frame itself and then the response rate of the mechanical systems themselves - in the shuttle's case the aero surfaces and the thrusters.
The important point of an avionics system is to keep the airframe in the zone of expected operation, you should never allow the airframe to get near the edge of the envelope where you might not be able to command it back in time.
The most important thing here is not the raw commputational power, but rather very accurate sensors so you can detect anomolies as soon as possible, and fast control reactions so you can correct them as quickly as possible. This is true of any closed circuit negative feedback control system that tries to minimise the error between the actual state of the system and the desired state of the system. These are all around us in the traction control systems of cars, the ABS, autopilots on planes. They don't need a lot of computing power, but they do need absolute reliability.
I'm guessing that the software may have failed to consider that a part that is not performing upto specifications is likely to have reduced structural integrity
Software is NOT intelligent, it doesn't make considerations. Engineers and software programmers make considerations. The software will be designed to cope with all the predicted conditions. If the engineers never considered the possibility of a damaged flight surface to be likely, then they wouldn't have required the software to cope with it.
At best you use your knowledge as an engineer and programmer to do your best that should the software experience conditions it was never desing for it does the best it can, but what "best it can" means is a decision of the humans that wrote the software.
Personally if I'm at Mach 20 balanced on a knife edge with plasma at 2300 Celsius a few feet away in a craft that needs reactions and senses far sharper and faster than a humans can every be to keep up this delicate dance on the edge of survivablity - then I don't want that system to go all 'fuzzy logic' on me and make guesses. I want a system that is utterly reliable and predictable, and for my guys on the ground to ask it to fly an utterly predicatble route.
What ever did happen to Columbia to the best of our knowledge the flight control system was within the range of its capability. The system would have been seeing the same readings as mission control could see in the telemetry. It was unusual in that in the final moments it was working harder than it had need to on any other flight, but according to NASA it was well within limits. It was in fact responding to the situation that the aero srufaces may not be giving it the response it needed and started to use the thrusters - an event that had been predicted, accounted for and planned for 30 years earlier when the avionics system was defined.
The avionics on the shuttle are just as capable today as they were when it was launched, if they were not up to the job then Columbia would have not made it back the first time.
Auto painting is the industries largest manufacturing expense, and this could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down
Sure - as soon as the cost comes down!
The biggest cost in solar power is the cost of collectors, so new material X could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down.
The biggest cost in overclocking is the cost of decent coolers, so liquid nitrogen cooling could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down.
The biggest cost in electric vehicles is the fancy batteries , so fuel cells could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down.
I agree whole heartedly with the parent comment, with a couple of reservations.
HiFi store for nice sound quality. HiFi speakers are designed to sound "nice" to your ears, by introducing various colorations that are not present in the original signal
I disagree with the term 'colorations' - this suggests that various extra signals can be introduced by speakers. Generally this can only be true for processing components like the pre amp, pre amp or the DAC. Speakers only vary in thier response at a particular frequency.
If you want to have accurate sound reproduction, you should consider buying studio monitors
Well yes and no. Monitors are designed for as flat a frequency response as possible and therefore be as unforgiving as possible of the source signal. That in itself will not give you a 'nice' sound quality, it will only show you the colorations in the rest of the system.
If you use Near Field Monitors than you are using speakers that are specifically designed to present the stereo image when right on top of them, whereas most HiFi speakers will only present an accurate image at a distance roughly equivalent to thier seperation.
If you are using the speakers in a normal PC setup then you need Near Field Monitors such as those produced by the late TDL, or as you suggest the Spirits (Haven't checked your other recommendations, always myself found Tannoys a little bright)
On a PC I doubt you really want a monitor grade sound reproduction system. They are designed to be totally unforgiving and highlight every single detail in the sound field. On a PC the hiss and pop of the 2 dollar DAC is going to be in your face, the distortions from MP3 compression, all that nasty clicking and buzzing becuase the sound card is unshielded and sitting in a fairly harsh RF environment.
Besides 'clinical' sound quality is not the same as 'good' sound quality. A totally clinical reprodcution is very tiring to listen to beacuse the faults are so obvious it detracts from the stuff that is okay.
For most people I would advise go and listen to the stuff you want to buy, NO HiFi component is perfect in its response so put together a chain of components that sound pleasing to your ear. If you listen for pleasure then your requirements are different from those running a home studio.
The better and more transparent you make your system the less source material you will have to play on it. Its no surprise that the majority of CD's are mastered with compression and effects and a tonal balance to make them sound good on 100 dollar boom boxes because thats 95% of the market - on a good HiFi it will sound terrible, on a monitor grade system unlistenable. Its no coincidence that most HiFi enthusiasts end up listening to classical music and live concert albums, as these are the few that are general produced in a tonal flat manner.
Put it this way - a soft focus photograph is generally a better portrait image to most people than a pin sharp unflattering photograph. The same goes with HiFi
In terms of is your hearing good enough to hear the difference - well that depends.
If your hearing is not damaged then it potentially is good enough, if its trained. Once you start listening to a quality system you may not notice right away the improvement, but go back to listening to the boom boxes and it will sound horrible and muddy. Then you will start to notice some of your albums sound more open, crisper, deeper, the sound more full,; yet others will remain closed in like sounds coming from in a bucket.
You can tell by the emotive, non technical words I'm using that the subtleties of tonal reproduction bettween a good system and a great system are exactly that - subtle - and very personal. The only person that can tell is YOU.
My rule of thumb is that for every zero you add the sound quality doubles. So a 100 'quid lifestyle hifi' sounds twice as good as a 10 quid radio. A 1000 quids worth of decent HiFi sounds twice as good. To get better you need to spend 10000 quid - and most people will stop with a system of a couple of grand because to get better costs so much more.
In summary to the original question you can get much better kit for not much more than a PC speaker system from your local HiFi dealer - but its not worth spending a huge amount because the PC as a source is very low quality.
the ENHANCED greenhouse effect *sigh*
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Blacker Than Black
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· Score: 2, Informative
this may alleviate the greenhouse effect... maybe...
I'd rather hope not
As my old Professor used to say "its the ENHANCED Greenhouse Effect thats the environmental problem, the normal Greenhouse Effect is what keeps us alive"
If our Atmosphere didn't 'trap' a certain amount of the incident energy from the sun, and the Oceans didn't transport this around the surface then out little planet would resemble a snowball.
This is what happens in an ice age when the Ocean/Atmosphere system flips into another metastable state and the large amount of ice and snow on the surface significantly changes the reflective properites of the planet and the whole system cools.
First we need to understand how this delicate balance actually works before we try and fix it. One thing we are learning is that the Ocean/Atmosphere system is not the safe stable thing we assumed it was, but its very dynamic with a number of metastable states. It can and has switched between states on a geologically quick (5000 years) timescale without much provocation. The bad news is that sustaining life is easy in the current state, it gets much harder in some of the others.
Like a pH buffered solution its quite possible that our environment can tolerate and compensate for all the stuff we chuck into it, and then suddenly flip to another state.
Oh, and the increment improvement in absorbtion will do very little to help solar collectors - the problem with solar collectors is doing something useful with the heat once you've got it, not getting it in the first place. Find me a material thats twice as good as a thermocouple than current technology and we may be on to something...
How difficult would it be to buy just one capacitor from your competitor (for $0.05), open it up and do a chemical analysis on it?
The trick isn't to find out what chemicals are in there. That's a relatively trivial exercise in gas chromatography or a mass spectrometer. Most well equiped schools, universities and certainly any research lab could do it and tell you the exact mix of chemicals in the electrolyte. I'm certain it happens most of the time.
But it doesn't gain you much. You then have to figure out how you get to the end result, or how to do it in the most cost effective fashion, or how to do it on a large scale.
Think about it - you can buy a chocolate cake from any supermarket, and its pretty easy to figure out whats in it. But without the recipie its pretty hard just to throw flour, eggs, milk and chocolate in a bowl and get the same cake, or be able to make 3000 a day and sell them for 5 dollars.
Interesting article, but a phrase used made me stop and look again.
I'm in the UK, and here the slang 'boob' is used to refer to a womans chest. I understand that in the US 'boob' is used to refer to someone of limited intellect.
Now the phrase 'boob tube' in the US clearly means TV for the intellectually challenged.
Unfortunately in the UK 'boob tube' means a particularly tasteless item of 80's fashion that was basically just a wide elasticated belt style top for women. Try putting 'boob tube 80' in google...
Kinda makes that paragraph scan slightly differently
To me moderation in the technical sense means one of two things.
1) Messages are reviewed by a moderating team before being publicly posted such as mailing lists
2) Messages are freely posted but a moderating team montiors them and removes ones that do not abide by the terms of use.
Since when did restricting what services your users can use become 'moderation'?
DALnet is still an unmoderated medium for CHAT - you can say what you like, organise a bank heist, tell all your l33t friends about the latest hijacked webserver your using to serve your warez. Nothing in this policy implies any moderation of speech.
I can speculate why they are enforcing this policy. When you run a community service where time, money, resources and effort are donnated by a large number of people for a certain purpose and a large number of the users use it for an entirely differnet purpose, costing you a lot of resources, and then also attack the service so that user you want to support can't use it, I guess I personally would be a little pissed.
The users they want are the users that want the services DALnet was originally designed for.
Do you think losing lots of hangers on is really going to worry them - every user on the system costs some supporter of DALnet money somewhere, its not like a membership site where they get revenue. Explain to me if I run a DALnet server why exactly I should be worried about losing users that use my box to swap warez, p0rn or coordinate a Sub7 attack on another machine?
When I find my webserver compromised and used as a warez server, are you saying I shouldn't lock it down because this will " undoubtedly upset someone with the means to launch an attack equivalent to the attacks {I} suffered recently"??
DALNet is a free service, they are not required to provide YOU with what YOU want, they are not a government aganecy or a paid membership site. YOU have a choice of IRC servers, and if you don't like any of them go ahead and set your own up.
You also couldn't reverse the thing the same way you reverse a normal vessel
But with an engine that small and no mechanical or electrical linkage needed to the actual engine - just turn the whole thing around.
You could use it like an outboard/sterndrive affair
On tug craft you could use several to replace the current bucket prob designs.
On large ships you could use banks of these along the hull. If they can orient them then you can spin the vessel in its own length, move it sideways, offset the forward and stern banks to assist the turning. Stopping would be easier as a big stern prop is horribly ineffecient in reverse, but turning the engine pods around would not effect them (Probably - not sure if reverseing the water flow over them may make them less effecient). Want to avoid a collision, just turn them sideways under way and shove yourself out of the way sideways.
The beaty IMHO is this thing is so simple all you need is a pipe and valve to regulate the steam from a central boiler, and a control system to turn it.
But was it not OS designers that brought us the concept of a login and password?
Do we 'login' to our office building? No we use some form of key, be that a tumbler lock or a swipe card.
Perhaps if we used a physical means of ID it would be easier for most people to use, USB dongle maybe.
I know there are problems about login for remote system, and I know that some people use pin codes to get in doors.
But I think my point is that so far most computer interfaces have been built by computer engineers that have a certain way of looking at the world.
MacOS was a bit different because a lot of its users were more the creative type, and I'd argue that the Mac interface is more 'transparent' to most people, which is why a large number of people who just want to get the job done like Macs.
Why do we enforce the filesystem concept - aren't we smart enough yet to have data stored on disk indexed so that fuzzy queries like "where is the sales report" can work - Google can do it for the web, why can't we do it for the file system?
The best example I have seen is a local school here in the UK. They were thinking of buying an interactive whiteboard system and invited me along as a tame techie to make sure they wearn't scammed. They also know I'm actually a trained teacher too so could 'translate' what the salesman was saying.
In the end I didn't need to translate - its so wonderfully simple a 5 year old could do it. I saw a roomful of computer phobic adults and teachers grasp the concept in 5 minutes. If you ever used an interactive whiteboard you'll know what I mean, if you haven't its difficlut to describe. They now have three and the 5-10 year olds in the school use them every day with no training.
But thats my point - we still think of the machine as a computer, the rest of the world just thinks of it as a tool. Now if we are as smart as we claim we can make that tool work for other people.
Thanks for that - I was fairly certain that they were equivalent, but all the resources I could find suggested D8 was slightly lower.
I certainly know in the earlier D8 machines Sony used a lower resolution imaging system at around 460 lines - efectively the old Hi8 ones - which would explain why there were reports of lower effective resolution.
I'm on your side - hogwash is a little harsh - wish I'd found that reference!!
Indeed it is, and I don't think we are disagreeing on that.
As the article says, it would also stop me getting through tapes at an ungodly speed
So what are you going to store your rushes and final edit on? Tape is still the most cost effective if you want to leave it in DV and therefore fully editable.
You mean these Sharp, Samsung, Hitcahi and Canon ones were a halucination? I guess they're all rebadged Sonys...
Hi8 was a Sony proprietary format. You'd have been better getting a cheap Sony D8 and using that to encode direct to DV. That and a D8 unit can be used as an analogue to DV bridge so you can digitise any video format.
DV Backup is here to answer the original question rather than your offtopic and inaccurate reply.
Errr - in what way does a DV tape differ from a D8 tape that makes it so special for digital data?
Both tapes use a helical scan method, just as VHS and DAT. So its not the scan method that must make them different.
Both tapes need to be high grade because digital data needs a good signal to noise ratio. With DV you don't get a choice its mandated, with D8 if you use nasty tape stock you get what is comming to you - use actual marked D8 tapes or high grade Hi8 tapes and you're fine. So its not the tape formulation that makes them different.
D8 tape is (not surprisingly) 8mm wide, whereas DV is 12.2mm for MiniDV (and full DV is 14.6 but we are comparing camcorder tapes) so there is a difference here. And you see it through a reduced bandwidth available - this translates into a slightly lower effective resolution, although Sony claims 520 lines for both DV and D8.
So which of these differences makes the physical tape less suitable for storing digital data?? I mean we've used 8mm tape for backup for years!!
The tape mechanisms themselves are also not just any old stock Hi8 ones - they are specifically designed for D8.
I bought a D8 unit for a number of reasons: - I have a significant amount of Hi8 stock. With a D8 unit I can digitise this into the computer. - I can enable Analogue->DV conversion across the cam allowing me to digitise in any analogue source. Discrete solutions such as the Dazzle DV bridge cost more than my camcorder! - I really don't get on with the handling of most MiniDV cameras, they're too small, and the good handling ones are expensive. - There is some kudos attached to MiniDV cameras, so you get charge more.
There is nothing special about a DV camera because of the tape format, its just MiniDV allows the camera to be physically smaller, and it has higher bandwidth so a slight higher resolution. The only thing D8 tapes can't do is have that little index chip that you can pay extra for in a MiniDV.
My D8 unit looks no different to everything connected to its IEEE1394 port than a DV unit, and I fully expect my D8 masters to be just as readable as your MiniDV ones in a few years time.
And in the fullness of time (and budget) I expect a Canon XM derivative to join the stable. I don't care what the tape is really, its the camera thats important.
Perhaps a cruical point that you mention you don't expand on - temporal compression. Hard Disk and DVD recording camcorders will need to use some form of interframe compression, which means editing is restricted to the keyframe points. DV is only compressed in the frame so remains fully editable. The loss of full editability is more important to me than anything I gain.
If you do a Google search for "Vertical Helical Scan" then you will find a large number of hits. Agreed this is not the best way to confirm as a large number of people can be wrong, but some of those sites are US Military and Nasa.
The terminology does make sense to me at least.
Scan means that the head is moving as well as the tape, not fixed. Helical means that the scan is helical on the tape, rather than transverse as in some early systems. Vertical means that the head and tape axis orientation is vertical rather than horizontal, as would be the case in older reel to reel where the axis was horizontal so that large loops of tape could hang down and buffer the start and stop acceleration.
I've always suspected that "Vertical Helical Scan" was an internal engineering acronym to differentiate the system from thier earlier Helical Scan machines, and also to protect against Sony finding out that JVC were desperately trying to come up with a home video format to compete with Betamax. This rapidly became "Video Home System" when it was marketed - similar to the way Windows releases have internal names, and an 'offical' name when released, which is why you don't find it on the JVC site.
Either that or "Vertical Helical Scan" was coined by someone other than JVC very early on and its been with us since then.
I guess only someone from JVC can truly answer that one.
This is a very interesting timeline of VCR developement (and no it doesn't mention Vertical Helical Scan either), with the early JVC Helical Scan machines here.
Acronyms Change With Time!
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Why VHS Was Better
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.
Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.
For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.
Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.
Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video
Look at the GSM mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.
DECT originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal. For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal
As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio
The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!
Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??
Last time I looked the idea was to collate interesting stories and articles from around the web and discuss them.
I'm not trying to go high brow or anything, I really enjoy the in jokes and the strong opinions, theres nothing wrong with it.
Its just I don't feel that a story submission should be full of personal opinion - thats up to the slashdotters to add in the comments where its subject to the ebb and flow of moderating - or am I missing something??
I think you will find the P2P companies will never actually defend filesharing of copyrighted works.
Thier very survival relies on the fact that thier software has significant non infringing uses, and that is the basis of the defence derived from the Sony VHS judgements.
Overpeer would not be degrading the quality of service because there is no service with P2P software - the P2P companies provide the software - Napster provided a service (the master index) and they got nailed for it.
Surely if someone attempts to carry out your property from your home you would expect the court to be sympathetic to any reasonable attempts you took to prevent it?
You wouldn't for instance expect a legal challenge from Joe Burglar against Chubb because a recent change in the design of your front door lock is reducing the quality of service hes getting from his lock pick supplier?
At the end of the day this idea threatens no one who is genuinely using P2P networks as so many people claim they are.
If you trade in copyrighted works then this will make your life a little harder.
Deal with it.
Our community started the war when they wrote Napster, now someone is bringing it out of the courts and onto our turf.
They assume all users are guilty of piracy, and will proceed with that in mind
I think, perhaps, if they find a piece of thier work on your server they are entitled to the view that you are carrying out a copyright infringing behaviour (not piracy - that can only happen if you attempt to take over a vessel at sea)
I would like to know when this is all going to come to a head, or is it going to be continue to continue spiralling until someone/something/group of someones intervenes. Perhaps it will stop when the majority of their user base becomes so alienated that purchasing a copy (licence) of a work is viewed as a faux pas.
Someone is trying to intervene - the owners of the copyrighted works. They hope it will stop when enough people are discouraged from using thier computers to carry out copy right infringement and find that its easier to actually buy the stuff.
But I totally agree that we need a carrot and stick. People want access to music in this way, and too many people are doing for them all to belong to the its-my-divine-right-to-have-everything-free-becaus e-i-read-slashdot-and-am-way-more-l33t-than-the-co rporate-coders brigade.
The ways to discourage them are
1 - to make it technically harder to do
2 - carry a greater risk of legal comebacks
3 - give them a legal route that they will pay for
I can't help but feel that option 3 will be cheaper for them to do, be better in PR terms, and actually increase thier revenue streams. So why are they stuck at 1 and 2?
this is pretty much wrong, because qualcomm's evolutionary path for cdma2000 was mapped out well quite a long time ago (cdma2000, cdma2000-1x, -1x-ev, -1x-evdo, etc...), where the upgrades are pretty MODEST in requirements. so its not clear why europe and gsm are fortunate here: 2.5g in europe requires planting new basestations all over the place...
First off do not mistake my comments as an attack on Qualcomm - which you seem to have done.
I'm sorry I disagree. In Europe every single operator is on GSM, in the US there are a number of competing standards.
I agree totally that the migration path for CDMA based networks based on Qualcomms equipment is well mapped, but that was not my point.
GPRS involves a software upgrade to the network hardware and the provision of a data infrastructure. The air interface does not change so absolutley no new basestations are needed.
So every operator in Europe can upgrade to GPRS with no outlay in new basestations, they only have to upgrade thier existing ones. Because we all use the same standard any GPRS customer will eventually be able to roam anywhere in Europe, whereas in the US you will only be able to roam between operators using Qualcomms equipment.
no, w-cdma (a.k.a. "wideband" cdma) was coined by the anti-qualcomm coalition of umts that wanted to stuff their new standard with the IP (intellectual property) of nokia, ericsson etc...
I made an error in the orginal post in not qualifying that statement, and if you check the posts you'll see I was corrected by someone who knew their standards, and I acknowledged that.
The reason the European NE manufacturers wanted to ensure they had input into the standard was that for GSM the sharing of IP had eventually been benefical for all the manufacturers, and they wanted the same to happen for UMTS. Qualcomm wanted to force thier IP into the standard with no sharing agreements expecting a rich stream of license fees for revenue.
I don't really want to get into that fight - its well documented in the industry - and in the end if it stops the services reaching the consumer every one loses.
I really don't understand your comments about IP - I was talking about the practical aspects of enginerring the air interface, building the networks and deploying services. The physics of the radio engineering is the same regardless of who is stiffing who because they got to the patent office first.
Indeed, and DoCoMo are doing very well with some 3G services to, building on thier earlier feature rich services.
In Europe it was recognised that there were huge benefits from all countries using the same standard for GSM, and so there was considerable momentum to do the same for 3G - my understanding is that roaming between states in the US is fairly troublesome and costly. In Europe when we went to GSM the roaming became pretty much a simple thing - sadly cost is still there!
The spectrum is available over in Europe - its already been reserved. It was unfortunate that the licenses for operators to use that spectrum were sold at the height of the dot com boom when silly prices were paid for things.
Certainly at the time the belief was that any operator who didn't get a license would be stuck with only a 'legacy' GSM network and would be out of buisness in 10 years, maybe sooner as investment and customers would switch away from them - understandably there was some fierce bidding for the licenses.
Since then the market has collapsed, and the big NE manufacturers are having problems delivering the equipment. This is a combination of it turning out to be more of a challenge to get working than originally thought, and the significant reduction in money available.
As an offshoot of that the operators are paying huge interest charges on the money they paid for licenses, and the time that they can see the network actually coming on line and some return being generated on that outlay is getting longer. Consequently a number of operators have decided to pay penalties and return the licenses to save money.
Again the availabilty of GPRS (and maybe soon EDGE) can give most of the user benefits of a UMTS system without requiring so much investment, retraining of operators, replanning of the radio network and also the handsets are much cheaper. This means the orginal assumption that 3G would rapidly take over from GSM is no longer true, so most investment is going into these '2.5G' services.
The main problem for all 3G operators is I have yet to see a convincing service that needs this capabilty that is mass market enough for consumers. Thats why I expect to see a lot of mid speed mobile data services being used to launch these networks.
If anyone can think of a great application that needs high speed mobile data access I suggest you get to the patent office!
Thanks for your comments.
I work on the management side of the development, as you probably guessed on UMTS being in Europe. I keep in touch with the radio side mainly out of curiosity as my training is a physcist.
By evolve into I meant the standards of how the network was run would evolve, I didn't mean the air interface would, this was my understanding.
I should have clarified which sections were my understanding, and which sections I was certain about. I hate causing confusion, especially if the comment gets a good mod.
You learn something everyday - thanks!
In Europe, "3G" (third generation) technologies were supposed to transform the economy, turning cell phones into mini-entertainment centers, but reality failed to live up to the hype.
Its difficult to say that '3G' or UMTS to be exact has failed in Europe, as most have not yet launched due to the financial strife in the telecoms sector limiting investment into the new infrastructure. In fact Hutchinson's Three (UK's first UMTS network) will be going live soon
Granted this pressure has resulted in GPRS '2.5G' becoming more widely adopted, and this can provide many of the benefits of UMTS as far as the user is concerned such as reasonable speed mobile data access, whilst being a step upgrade to the GSM netwrok so cheaper to role out and not needing thousands of new masts (UMTS needs masts in different physical locations as it uses a different radio system - see later)
In this respect Europe is in a more fortunate than the US as GSM digital cellular networks have become the standard, so the upgrade to GPRS is a logical one.
The growing interest in EvDO adds to the momentum of Qualcomm's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard that is now used by some of the largest wireless companies, including Verizon and Sprint Corp
This is a strange tack to take, given the dismisal of '3G' as a failure a few lines before.
In Europe the new standard chosen to replace GSM was UMTS, which is based on a CDMA radio sub system. This is a spread spectrum method which brings many benefits, but means you need new masts as the radio coverage is different.
In the US you have Qualcomm's CDMA 2000 system which will evolve into the W-CDMA standard
In practical aspect these are equivalent systems, at least as far as the radio engineering goes - the differences mainly being in how the networks are run and how data is transfered, the underlying carrier technology is very similar, and infact most of the equipment is the same, differing only in the management systems.
So in Europe the delayed roll out of UMTS can be seen really as a factor of the depressed state of the telecoms market, and the fact that the cheaper to roll out GSM based GPRS system gives you high speed data access.
In the US there is no easy upgrade from an existing network as GSM didn't make much of an inroad and the better range in fringe areas of analogue systems like TACS is more suitable to the larger country.
Realistically the only way for the major equipment providers to realise the return on investment of thier CDMA technology is to go after the one thing the alternatives don't do well, the domain of large scale wireless data access.
I wouldn't class the following as Top 40 or rap Slaid Cleeves Will Kimbrough Beth Neilson Chapman and yet I bought albums from these people on the strength of the songs.
Its not as simple as album/song - some albums are great in thier own right, but it has to be said most of these are classic albums because you couldn't skip down the tracks on an LP so you crafted it with more care. On a CD many people hit random - you still care (if you are good) about putting together a complimentary set of tracks, but maybe not as much as with an LP.
Good music is a richer experience than that - I don't want anyone dictating what I can and cant do. It annoys me immensly that tracks I have on tape I can't get on CD because the album has been 'deleted'. It annoys me that radio will play one great track for weeks before I can get the album to listen to the other good tracks and hear it in context. It annoys me that having bought a collection of music that I can't select and group tracks that fit my musical taste and reflect my personal expression onto a CD for me to listen too because any attempt to do so is regarded as criminal.
Real musicians also do gigs - and they don't trot out the albums track for track. They play songs that are meaningful to them, explain what it means to them, why they wrote it.
I listen to songs, and studio albums, and live albums, and big concerts and small gigs and watch music videos... its all part of the richness of musical experience that is just enjoying music.
In this case it was a magazine cover disk with a CD music sampler of dance tracks on ones side, and a DVD with the raw sound samples and some WinX software to remix them on the other, with video tutorials on how to do it and interviews etc.
Now dance isn't my scene, but it was a cool concept.
How many people are aware that pressed pre-recorded DVDs are actually two pressings glued together?
Pressing a CD and a DVD half is trivial, and all the infrastructure is there. The question remains why it hasn't been done more often.
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They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage
... additional computation power might be helpful
But not the most important requirment. Amongst the most important requirements is that the system should be able to perform all the tasks it needs to, faultlessly and reliably.
The shuttle avionics exist and survive in one of the harshest environments available. The suffer heavy vibration and heavy radiation compared to other avionics such as used in military jets. More modern avionics are less suited to survive either.
Having a lighter faster computer that needs more radiation shielding to ensure reliable operation does not gain you much.
The flight system in the shuttle was fully capable of flying the craft when it was first launched, and until proved otherwise it remains fully capable of doing the job.
Why replace an avionics system that has returned the craft without fault over a hundred times, with one that never has? Do you have any idea the cost and development time of developing 5 multiple redundant intrinsically safe mission computers is likely to be - and is replacing a functioning avionics system at such a cost a good use of budget that could be better spent on science?
They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate
The limiting factor of any avionics system is the response rate of the air frame itself and then the response rate of the mechanical systems themselves - in the shuttle's case the aero surfaces and the thrusters.
The important point of an avionics system is to keep the airframe in the zone of expected operation, you should never allow the airframe to get near the edge of the envelope where you might not be able to command it back in time.
The most important thing here is not the raw commputational power, but rather very accurate sensors so you can detect anomolies as soon as possible, and fast control reactions so you can correct them as quickly as possible. This is true of any closed circuit negative feedback control system that tries to minimise the error between the actual state of the system and the desired state of the system. These are all around us in the traction control systems of cars, the ABS, autopilots on planes. They don't need a lot of computing power, but they do need absolute reliability.
I'm guessing that the software may have failed to consider that a part that is not performing upto specifications is likely to have reduced structural integrity
Software is NOT intelligent, it doesn't make considerations. Engineers and software programmers make considerations. The software will be designed to cope with all the predicted conditions. If the engineers never considered the possibility of a damaged flight surface to be likely, then they wouldn't have required the software to cope with it.
At best you use your knowledge as an engineer and programmer to do your best that should the software experience conditions it was never desing for it does the best it can, but what "best it can" means is a decision of the humans that wrote the software.
Personally if I'm at Mach 20 balanced on a knife edge with plasma at 2300 Celsius a few feet away in a craft that needs reactions and senses far sharper and faster than a humans can every be to keep up this delicate dance on the edge of survivablity - then I don't want that system to go all 'fuzzy logic' on me and make guesses. I want a system that is utterly reliable and predictable, and for my guys on the ground to ask it to fly an utterly predicatble route.
What ever did happen to Columbia to the best of our knowledge the flight control system was within the range of its capability. The system would have been seeing the same readings as mission control could see in the telemetry. It was unusual in that in the final moments it was working harder than it had need to on any other flight, but according to NASA it was well within limits. It was in fact responding to the situation that the aero srufaces may not be giving it the response it needed and started to use the thrusters - an event that had been predicted, accounted for and planned for 30 years earlier when the avionics system was defined.
The avionics on the shuttle are just as capable today as they were when it was launched, if they were not up to the job then Columbia would have not made it back the first time.
Auto painting is the industries largest manufacturing expense, and this could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down
Sure - as soon as the cost comes down!
The biggest cost in solar power is the cost of collectors, so new material X could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down.
The biggest cost in overclocking is the cost of decent coolers, so liquid nitrogen cooling could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down.
The biggest cost in electric vehicles is the fancy batteries , so fuel cells could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down.
Is it me?
I agree whole heartedly with the parent comment, with a couple of reservations.
HiFi store for nice sound quality. HiFi speakers are designed to sound "nice" to your ears, by introducing various colorations that are not present in the original signal
I disagree with the term 'colorations' - this suggests that various extra signals can be introduced by speakers. Generally this can only be true for processing components like the pre amp, pre amp or the DAC. Speakers only vary in thier response at a particular frequency.
If you want to have accurate sound reproduction, you should consider buying studio monitors
Well yes and no. Monitors are designed for as flat a frequency response as possible and therefore be as unforgiving as possible of the source signal. That in itself will not give you a 'nice' sound quality, it will only show you the colorations in the rest of the system.
If you use Near Field Monitors than you are using speakers that are specifically designed to present the stereo image when right on top of them, whereas most HiFi speakers will only present an accurate image at a distance roughly equivalent to thier seperation.
If you are using the speakers in a normal PC setup then you need Near Field Monitors such as those produced by the late TDL, or as you suggest the Spirits (Haven't checked your other recommendations, always myself found Tannoys a little bright)
On a PC I doubt you really want a monitor grade sound reproduction system. They are designed to be totally unforgiving and highlight every single detail in the sound field. On a PC the hiss and pop of the 2 dollar DAC is going to be in your face, the distortions from MP3 compression, all that nasty clicking and buzzing becuase the sound card is unshielded and sitting in a fairly harsh RF environment.
Besides 'clinical' sound quality is not the same as 'good' sound quality. A totally clinical reprodcution is very tiring to listen to beacuse the faults are so obvious it detracts from the stuff that is okay.
For most people I would advise go and listen to the stuff you want to buy, NO HiFi component is perfect in its response so put together a chain of components that sound pleasing to your ear. If you listen for pleasure then your requirements are different from those running a home studio.
The better and more transparent you make your system the less source material you will have to play on it. Its no surprise that the majority of CD's are mastered with compression and effects and a tonal balance to make them sound good on 100 dollar boom boxes because thats 95% of the market - on a good HiFi it will sound terrible, on a monitor grade system unlistenable. Its no coincidence that most HiFi enthusiasts end up listening to classical music and live concert albums, as these are the few that are general produced in a tonal flat manner.
Put it this way - a soft focus photograph is generally a better portrait image to most people than a pin sharp unflattering photograph. The same goes with HiFi
In terms of is your hearing good enough to hear the difference - well that depends.
If your hearing is not damaged then it potentially is good enough, if its trained. Once you start listening to a quality system you may not notice right away the improvement, but go back to listening to the boom boxes and it will sound horrible and muddy. Then you will start to notice some of your albums sound more open, crisper, deeper, the sound more full,; yet others will remain closed in like sounds coming from in a bucket.
You can tell by the emotive, non technical words I'm using that the subtleties of tonal reproduction bettween a good system and a great system are exactly that - subtle - and very personal. The only person that can tell is YOU.
My rule of thumb is that for every zero you add the sound quality doubles. So a 100 'quid lifestyle hifi' sounds twice as good as a 10 quid radio. A 1000 quids worth of decent HiFi sounds twice as good. To get better you need to spend 10000 quid - and most people will stop with a system of a couple of grand because to get better costs so much more.
In summary to the original question you can get much better kit for not much more than a PC speaker system from your local HiFi dealer - but its not worth spending a huge amount because the PC as a source is very low quality.
this may alleviate the greenhouse effect ... maybe ...
I'd rather hope not
As my old Professor used to say "its the ENHANCED Greenhouse Effect thats the environmental problem, the normal Greenhouse Effect is what keeps us alive"
If our Atmosphere didn't 'trap' a certain amount of the incident energy from the sun, and the Oceans didn't transport this around the surface then out little planet would resemble a snowball.
This is what happens in an ice age when the Ocean/Atmosphere system flips into another metastable state and the large amount of ice and snow on the surface significantly changes the reflective properites of the planet and the whole system cools.
First we need to understand how this delicate balance actually works before we try and fix it. One thing we are learning is that the Ocean/Atmosphere system is not the safe stable thing we assumed it was, but its very dynamic with a number of metastable states. It can and has switched between states on a geologically quick (5000 years) timescale without much provocation. The bad news is that sustaining life is easy in the current state, it gets much harder in some of the others.
Like a pH buffered solution its quite possible that our environment can tolerate and compensate for all the stuff we chuck into it, and then suddenly flip to another state.
Oh, and the increment improvement in absorbtion will do very little to help solar collectors - the problem with solar collectors is doing something useful with the heat once you've got it, not getting it in the first place. Find me a material thats twice as good as a thermocouple than current technology and we may be on to something...
How difficult would it be to buy just one capacitor from your competitor (for $0.05), open it up and do a chemical analysis on it?
The trick isn't to find out what chemicals are in there. That's a relatively trivial exercise in gas chromatography or a mass spectrometer. Most well equiped schools, universities and certainly any research lab could do it and tell you the exact mix of chemicals in the electrolyte. I'm certain it happens most of the time.
But it doesn't gain you much. You then have to figure out how you get to the end result, or how to do it in the most cost effective fashion, or how to do it on a large scale.
Think about it - you can buy a chocolate cake from any supermarket, and its pretty easy to figure out whats in it. But without the recipie its pretty hard just to throw flour, eggs, milk and chocolate in a bowl and get the same cake, or be able to make 3000 a day and sell them for 5 dollars.
Because it was opposite The Twin Towers, maybe?
That would be The Two Towers.
Its really spooky how often that mistake is made...
Interesting article, but a phrase used made me stop and look again.
I'm in the UK, and here the slang 'boob' is used to refer to a womans chest. I understand that in the US 'boob' is used to refer to someone of limited intellect.
Now the phrase 'boob tube' in the US clearly means TV for the intellectually challenged.
Unfortunately in the UK 'boob tube' means a particularly tasteless item of 80's fashion that was basically just a wide elasticated belt style top for women. Try putting 'boob tube 80' in google...
Kinda makes that paragraph scan slightly differently
Sorry - I don't see how this is a 'moderation'
To me moderation in the technical sense means one of two things.
1) Messages are reviewed by a moderating team before being publicly posted such as mailing lists
2) Messages are freely posted but a moderating team montiors them and removes ones that do not abide by the terms of use.
Since when did restricting what services your users can use become 'moderation'?
DALnet is still an unmoderated medium for CHAT - you can say what you like, organise a bank heist, tell all your l33t friends about the latest hijacked webserver your using to serve your warez. Nothing in this policy implies any moderation of speech.
I can speculate why they are enforcing this policy. When you run a community service where time, money, resources and effort are donnated by a large number of people for a certain purpose and a large number of the users use it for an entirely differnet purpose, costing you a lot of resources, and then also attack the service so that user you want to support can't use it, I guess I personally would be a little pissed.
The users they want are the users that want the services DALnet was originally designed for.
Do you think losing lots of hangers on is really going to worry them - every user on the system costs some supporter of DALnet money somewhere, its not like a membership site where they get revenue. Explain to me if I run a DALnet server why exactly I should be worried about losing users that use my box to swap warez, p0rn or coordinate a Sub7 attack on another machine?
When I find my webserver compromised and used as a warez server, are you saying I shouldn't lock it down because this will " undoubtedly upset someone with the means to launch an attack equivalent to the attacks {I} suffered recently"??
DALNet is a free service, they are not required to provide YOU with what YOU want, they are not a government aganecy or a paid membership site. YOU have a choice of IRC servers, and if you don't like any of them go ahead and set your own up.
You also couldn't reverse the thing the same way you reverse a normal vessel
But with an engine that small and no mechanical or electrical linkage needed to the actual engine - just turn the whole thing around.
You could use it like an outboard/sterndrive affair
On tug craft you could use several to replace the current bucket prob designs.
On large ships you could use banks of these along the hull. If they can orient them then you can spin the vessel in its own length, move it sideways, offset the forward and stern banks to assist the turning. Stopping would be easier as a big stern prop is horribly ineffecient in reverse, but turning the engine pods around would not effect them (Probably - not sure if reverseing the water flow over them may make them less effecient). Want to avoid a collision, just turn them sideways under way and shove yourself out of the way sideways.
The beaty IMHO is this thing is so simple all you need is a pipe and valve to regulate the steam from a central boiler, and a control system to turn it.
This could potential make for very agile vessels.
But was it not OS designers that brought us the concept of a login and password?
Do we 'login' to our office building? No we use some form of key, be that a tumbler lock or a swipe card.
Perhaps if we used a physical means of ID it would be easier for most people to use, USB dongle maybe.
I know there are problems about login for remote system, and I know that some people use pin codes to get in doors.
But I think my point is that so far most computer interfaces have been built by computer engineers that have a certain way of looking at the world.
MacOS was a bit different because a lot of its users were more the creative type, and I'd argue that the Mac interface is more 'transparent' to most people, which is why a large number of people who just want to get the job done like Macs.
Why do we enforce the filesystem concept - aren't we smart enough yet to have data stored on disk indexed so that fuzzy queries like "where is the sales report" can work - Google can do it for the web, why can't we do it for the file system?
The best example I have seen is a local school here in the UK. They were thinking of buying an interactive whiteboard system and invited me along as a tame techie to make sure they wearn't scammed. They also know I'm actually a trained teacher too so could 'translate' what the salesman was saying.
In the end I didn't need to translate - its so wonderfully simple a 5 year old could do it. I saw a roomful of computer phobic adults and teachers grasp the concept in 5 minutes. If you ever used an interactive whiteboard you'll know what I mean, if you haven't its difficlut to describe. They now have three and the 5-10 year olds in the school use them every day with no training.
But thats my point - we still think of the machine as a computer, the rest of the world just thinks of it as a tool. Now if we are as smart as we claim we can make that tool work for other people.
Thanks for that - I was fairly certain that they were equivalent, but all the resources I could find suggested D8 was slightly lower.
I certainly know in the earlier D8 machines Sony used a lower resolution imaging system at around 460 lines - efectively the old Hi8 ones - which would explain why there were reports of lower effective resolution.
I'm on your side - hogwash is a little harsh - wish I'd found that reference!!
This thing is cool
Indeed it is, and I don't think we are disagreeing on that.
As the article says, it would also stop me getting through tapes at an ungodly speed
So what are you going to store your rushes and final edit on? Tape is still the most cost effective if you want to leave it in DV and therefore fully editable.
Agree with you about the 1x capture though!
You mean these Sharp, Samsung, Hitcahi and Canon ones were a halucination? I guess they're all rebadged Sonys...
Hi8 was a Sony proprietary format. You'd have been better getting a cheap Sony D8 and using that to encode direct to DV. That and a D8 unit can be used as an analogue to DV bridge so you can digitise any video format.
DV Backup is here to answer the original question rather than your offtopic and inaccurate reply.
Errr - in what way does a DV tape differ from a D8 tape that makes it so special for digital data?
Both tapes use a helical scan method, just as VHS and DAT. So its not the scan method that must make them different.
Both tapes need to be high grade because digital data needs a good signal to noise ratio. With DV you don't get a choice its mandated, with D8 if you use nasty tape stock you get what is comming to you - use actual marked D8 tapes or high grade Hi8 tapes and you're fine. So its not the tape formulation that makes them different.
D8 tape is (not surprisingly) 8mm wide, whereas DV is 12.2mm for MiniDV (and full DV is 14.6 but we are comparing camcorder tapes) so there is a difference here. And you see it through a reduced bandwidth available - this translates into a slightly lower effective resolution, although Sony claims 520 lines for both DV and D8.
So which of these differences makes the physical tape less suitable for storing digital data?? I mean we've used 8mm tape for backup for years!!
The tape mechanisms themselves are also not just any old stock Hi8 ones - they are specifically designed for D8.
I bought a D8 unit for a number of reasons:
- I have a significant amount of Hi8 stock. With a D8 unit I can digitise this into the computer.
- I can enable Analogue->DV conversion across the cam allowing me to digitise in any analogue source. Discrete solutions such as the Dazzle DV bridge cost more than my camcorder!
- I really don't get on with the handling of most MiniDV cameras, they're too small, and the good handling ones are expensive.
- There is some kudos attached to MiniDV cameras, so you get charge more.
There is nothing special about a DV camera because of the tape format, its just MiniDV allows the camera to be physically smaller, and it has higher bandwidth so a slight higher resolution. The only thing D8 tapes can't do is have that little index chip that you can pay extra for in a MiniDV.
My D8 unit looks no different to everything connected to its IEEE1394 port than a DV unit, and I fully expect my D8 masters to be just as readable as your MiniDV ones in a few years time.
And in the fullness of time (and budget) I expect a Canon XM derivative to join the stable. I don't care what the tape is really, its the camera thats important.
Perhaps a cruical point that you mention you don't expand on - temporal compression. Hard Disk and DVD recording camcorders will need to use some form of interframe compression, which means editing is restricted to the keyframe points. DV is only compressed in the frame so remains fully editable. The loss of full editability is more important to me than anything I gain.
Curious isn't it?
If you do a Google search for "Vertical Helical Scan" then you will find a large number of hits. Agreed this is not the best way to confirm as a large number of people can be wrong, but some of those sites are US Military and Nasa.
The terminology does make sense to me at least.
Scan means that the head is moving as well as the tape, not fixed.
Helical means that the scan is helical on the tape, rather than transverse as in some early systems.
Vertical means that the head and tape axis orientation is vertical rather than horizontal, as would be the case in older reel to reel where the axis was horizontal so that large loops of tape could hang down and buffer the start and stop acceleration.
I've always suspected that "Vertical Helical Scan" was an internal engineering acronym to differentiate the system from thier earlier Helical Scan machines, and also to protect against Sony finding out that JVC were desperately trying to come up with a home video format to compete with Betamax. This rapidly became "Video Home System" when it was marketed - similar to the way Windows releases have internal names, and an 'offical' name when released, which is why you don't find it on the JVC site.
Either that or "Vertical Helical Scan" was coined by someone other than JVC very early on and its been with us since then.
I guess only someone from JVC can truly answer that one.
This is a very interesting timeline of VCR developement (and no it doesn't mention Vertical Helical Scan either), with the early JVC Helical Scan machines here.
There is a remarkable phenmenom with technical acronyms.
Thier meaning shifts over time. Mainly this is because the technology they describe becomes successful and the meaning of the orginal expansion is no longer valid. However the acronym is firmly rooted almost like a brand name, so usually the expansion is changed.
For instance VHS did originally expand to Vertical Helical Scan - which is a description of the way that the enigineering team solved how keep the tape speed over the head high without having to have the tape itself spooling at hig speed and therefor needing a huge amount of it.
Later as it became popular and mass market the expansion changed to Video Home System as this was more understandable for the consumer.
Video Home System (a less daunting rendering of the original acronym, which stood for Vertical Helical Scan)
Reference : Baird to MPEG A History Of Video
Look at the GSM mobile phone standard. Orignially this stood for Group Spécial Mobile - a special interest of the CEPT set up to develop one digital standard, based on the existing ISDN standard,for mobile phones in Europe to replace the mess of competing analogue ones.
Nowadays, given the massive success of the standard the expansion is Global System for Mobile communications .
DECT originally stood for Digital European Cordless Terminal . For the non Europeans its a standard for short range digital handset to base station communication for cordless phones. Being a standard you can now buy extra handsets from whoever you want, and things like wireless modems. As its success took off and it began to be used outside of Europe then the expansion changed to Digital Enhanced Cordless Terminal
As mentioned elsewher in this thread DVD originally stood for Digital Video Disc but as it became apparent that a high capacity replacement for CD could have many uses it was renamed to Digital Versatile Disc with the convention that the specific use is tagged afterwards, hence DVD-Video, DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio The moral of the story is be careful what you state an acronym stands for - a whole load of them in daily use have stood for a number of things in thier history!!
Oh, and yes I do currently work in the telecoms side of it, how did you guess??
Last time I looked the idea was to collate interesting stories and articles from around the web and discuss them.
I'm not trying to go high brow or anything, I really enjoy the in jokes and the strong opinions, theres nothing wrong with it.
Its just I don't feel that a story submission should be full of personal opinion - thats up to the slashdotters to add in the comments where its subject to the ebb and flow of moderating - or am I missing something??
I think you will find the P2P companies will never actually defend filesharing of copyrighted works.
Thier very survival relies on the fact that thier software has significant non infringing uses, and that is the basis of the defence derived from the Sony VHS judgements.
Overpeer would not be degrading the quality of service because there is no service with P2P software - the P2P companies provide the software - Napster provided a service (the master index) and they got nailed for it.
Surely if someone attempts to carry out your property from your home you would expect the court to be sympathetic to any reasonable attempts you took to prevent it?
You wouldn't for instance expect a legal challenge from Joe Burglar against Chubb because a recent change in the design of your front door lock is reducing the quality of service hes getting from his lock pick supplier?
At the end of the day this idea threatens no one who is genuinely using P2P networks as so many people claim they are.
If you trade in copyrighted works then this will make your life a little harder.
Deal with it.
Our community started the war when they wrote Napster, now someone is bringing it out of the courts and onto our turf.
As the SAS say "Big Boys Games - Big Boys Rules"
They assume all users are guilty of piracy, and will proceed with that in mind
s e-i-read-slashdot-and-am-way-more-l33t-than-the-co rporate-coders brigade.
I think, perhaps, if they find a piece of thier work on your server they are entitled to the view that you are carrying out a copyright infringing behaviour
(not piracy - that can only happen if you attempt to take over a vessel at sea)
I would like to know when this is all going to come to a head, or is it going to be continue to continue spiralling until someone/something/group of someones intervenes. Perhaps it will stop when the majority of their user base becomes so alienated that purchasing a copy (licence) of a work is viewed as a faux pas.
Someone is trying to intervene - the owners of the copyrighted works. They hope it will stop when enough people are discouraged from using thier computers to carry out copy right infringement and find that its easier to actually buy the stuff.
But I totally agree that we need a carrot and stick. People want access to music in this way, and too many people are doing for them all to belong to the its-my-divine-right-to-have-everything-free-becau
The ways to discourage them are
1 - to make it technically harder to do
2 - carry a greater risk of legal comebacks
3 - give them a legal route that they will pay for
I can't help but feel that option 3 will be cheaper for them to do, be better in PR terms, and actually increase thier revenue streams. So why are they stuck at 1 and 2?
this is pretty much wrong, because qualcomm's evolutionary path for cdma2000 was mapped out well quite a long time ago (cdma2000, cdma2000-1x, -1x-ev, -1x-evdo, etc ...), where the upgrades are pretty MODEST in requirements. so its not clear why europe and gsm are fortunate here: 2.5g in europe requires planting new basestations all over the place ...
...
First off do not mistake my comments as an attack on Qualcomm - which you seem to have done.
I'm sorry I disagree. In Europe every single operator is on GSM, in the US there are a number of competing standards.
I agree totally that the migration path for CDMA based networks based on Qualcomms equipment is well mapped, but that was not my point.
GPRS involves a software upgrade to the network hardware and the provision of a data infrastructure. The air interface does not change so absolutley no new basestations are needed.
So every operator in Europe can upgrade to GPRS with no outlay in new basestations, they only have to upgrade thier existing ones. Because we all use the same standard any GPRS customer will eventually be able to roam anywhere in Europe, whereas in the US you will only be able to roam between operators using Qualcomms equipment.
no, w-cdma (a.k.a. "wideband" cdma) was coined by the anti-qualcomm coalition of umts that wanted to stuff their new standard with the IP (intellectual property) of nokia, ericsson etc
I made an error in the orginal post in not qualifying that statement, and if you check the posts you'll see I was corrected by someone who knew their standards, and I acknowledged that.
The reason the European NE manufacturers wanted to ensure they had input into the standard was that for GSM the sharing of IP had eventually been benefical for all the manufacturers, and they wanted the same to happen for UMTS. Qualcomm wanted to force thier IP into the standard with no sharing agreements expecting a rich stream of license fees for revenue.
I don't really want to get into that fight - its well documented in the industry - and in the end if it stops the services reaching the consumer every one loses.
I really don't understand your comments about IP - I was talking about the practical aspects of enginerring the air interface, building the networks and deploying services. The physics of the radio engineering is the same regardless of who is stiffing who because they got to the patent office first.
Indeed, and DoCoMo are doing very well with some 3G services to, building on thier earlier feature rich services.
In Europe it was recognised that there were huge benefits from all countries using the same standard for GSM, and so there was considerable momentum to do the same for 3G - my understanding is that roaming between states in the US is fairly troublesome and costly. In Europe when we went to GSM the roaming became pretty much a simple thing - sadly cost is still there!
The spectrum is available over in Europe - its already been reserved. It was unfortunate that the licenses for operators to use that spectrum were sold at the height of the dot com boom when silly prices were paid for things.
Certainly at the time the belief was that any operator who didn't get a license would be stuck with only a 'legacy' GSM network and would be out of buisness in 10 years, maybe sooner as investment and customers would switch away from them - understandably there was some fierce bidding for the licenses.
Since then the market has collapsed, and the big NE manufacturers are having problems delivering the equipment. This is a combination of it turning out to be more of a challenge to get working than originally thought, and the significant reduction in money available.
As an offshoot of that the operators are paying huge interest charges on the money they paid for licenses, and the time that they can see the network actually coming on line and some return being generated on that outlay is getting longer. Consequently a number of operators have decided to pay penalties and return the licenses to save money.
Again the availabilty of GPRS (and maybe soon EDGE) can give most of the user benefits of a UMTS system without requiring so much investment, retraining of operators, replanning of the radio network and also the handsets are much cheaper. This means the orginal assumption that 3G would rapidly take over from GSM is no longer true, so most investment is going into these '2.5G' services.
The main problem for all 3G operators is I have yet to see a convincing service that needs this capabilty that is mass market enough for consumers. Thats why I expect to see a lot of mid speed mobile data services being used to launch these networks.
If anyone can think of a great application that needs high speed mobile data access I suggest you get to the patent office!
Thanks for your comments. I work on the management side of the development, as you probably guessed on UMTS being in Europe. I keep in touch with the radio side mainly out of curiosity as my training is a physcist. By evolve into I meant the standards of how the network was run would evolve, I didn't mean the air interface would, this was my understanding. I should have clarified which sections were my understanding, and which sections I was certain about. I hate causing confusion, especially if the comment gets a good mod. You learn something everyday - thanks!
In Europe, "3G" (third generation) technologies were supposed to transform the economy, turning cell phones into mini-entertainment centers, but reality failed to live up to the hype.
Its difficult to say that '3G' or UMTS to be exact has failed in Europe, as most have not yet launched due to the financial strife in the telecoms sector limiting investment into the new infrastructure. In fact Hutchinson's Three (UK's first UMTS network) will be going live soon
Granted this pressure has resulted in GPRS '2.5G' becoming more widely adopted, and this can provide many of the benefits of UMTS as far as the user is concerned such as reasonable speed mobile data access, whilst being a step upgrade to the GSM netwrok so cheaper to role out and not needing thousands of new masts (UMTS needs masts in different physical locations as it uses a different radio system - see later)
In this respect Europe is in a more fortunate than the US as GSM digital cellular networks have become the standard, so the upgrade to GPRS is a logical one.
The growing interest in EvDO adds to the momentum of Qualcomm's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard that is now used by some of the largest wireless companies, including Verizon and Sprint Corp
This is a strange tack to take, given the dismisal of '3G' as a failure a few lines before.
In Europe the new standard chosen to replace GSM was UMTS, which is based on a CDMA radio sub system. This is a spread spectrum method which brings many benefits, but means you need new masts as the radio coverage is different.
In the US you have Qualcomm's CDMA 2000 system which will evolve into the W-CDMA standard
In practical aspect these are equivalent systems, at least as far as the radio engineering goes - the differences mainly being in how the networks are run and how data is transfered, the underlying carrier technology is very similar, and infact most of the equipment is the same, differing only in the management systems.
So in Europe the delayed roll out of UMTS can be seen really as a factor of the depressed state of the telecoms market, and the fact that the cheaper to roll out GSM based GPRS system gives you high speed data access.
In the US there is no easy upgrade from an existing network as GSM didn't make much of an inroad and the better range in fringe areas of analogue systems like TACS is more suitable to the larger country.
Realistically the only way for the major equipment providers to realise the return on investment of thier CDMA technology is to go after the one thing the alternatives don't do well, the domain of large scale wireless data access.
I wouldn't class the following as Top 40 or rap
Slaid Cleeves
Will Kimbrough
Beth Neilson Chapman
and yet I bought albums from these people on the strength of the songs.
Its not as simple as album/song - some albums are great in thier own right, but it has to be said most of these are classic albums because you couldn't skip down the tracks on an LP so you crafted it with more care. On a CD many people hit random - you still care (if you are good) about putting together a complimentary set of tracks, but maybe not as much as with an LP.
Good music is a richer experience than that - I don't want anyone dictating what I can and cant do.
It annoys me immensly that tracks I have on tape I can't get on CD because the album has been 'deleted'.
It annoys me that radio will play one great track for weeks before I can get the album to listen to the other good tracks and hear it in context.
It annoys me that having bought a collection of music that I can't select and group tracks that fit my musical taste and reflect my personal expression onto a CD for me to listen too because any attempt to do so is regarded as criminal.
Real musicians also do gigs - and they don't trot out the albums track for track. They play songs that are meaningful to them, explain what it means to them, why they wrote it.
I listen to songs, and studio albums, and live albums, and big concerts and small gigs and watch music videos... its all part of the richness of musical experience that is just enjoying music.
I've seen them over here in the UK too.
In this case it was a magazine cover disk with a CD music sampler of dance tracks on ones side, and a DVD with the raw sound samples and some WinX software to remix them on the other, with video tutorials on how to do it and interviews etc.
Now dance isn't my scene, but it was a cool concept.
How many people are aware that pressed pre-recorded DVDs are actually two pressings glued together?
Pressing a CD and a DVD half is trivial, and all the infrastructure is there. The question remains why it hasn't been done more often.