Perhaps you`d like to explain why Sky, the market leader in the U.K. has never been cracked
Care to explain that one?
I have seen and handled all in one homebrew cards for the Analogue system that worked look here
I have seen and handled cards that connected to a laptop to do decryption on the digital system - to be fair not working at the time I saw it.
You can also make attempts at cloning smartcards if you feel you're l33t enough try Cardman for some hardware - but don't please ask him *how* to do it - he got burned by some of the flack around the ITV Digital pirating issues and is now sticking firmly to just supplying hobbists tools to stay well clear of the allegations. Spend some time looking if it interests you.
One of the problems in broadcast systems is the system is only as secure as the people that run it. As soon as a disgruntled tech leaks some info about the encryption used then you have a chance to brute force it. Self authenticating systems are only secure when they can 'phone home' otherwise tech savvy consumers pop the lid off and start sticking the logic probes around the EPROMS - maybe this is why the Sky Digiboxes have to be connected to a live phone line or they have a paddy?
Now issues that do concern me with Sky is that the various broadcasting regulations in the UK mean that any digital reciever should be able to display free to air broadcast. This is because the operators with a license to broadcast nationally are obliged to carry the national stations (BBC) that people have already paid for through thier TV license. This is via cable / terrestrial or sat. They are also required to provide support for other broadcasters decrypt cards - this is designed to prevent monopolies by one company flooding the market with 'free' STB's - the ON Digital boxes mostly had two slots for a reason.
But on Sky the 'free to air' channels are encrypted - you have to apply for the 'free to air' decrypt card. And this is on the very boundry of breaking the conditions. There is also no capability of taking an extra decrypt card, nor as in the old analogue system adding an external decoder.
Additionally if the Digibox does not receive a signal from one of the Astra (Sky's own) series of satellites for a while then it resets its memory.
Why is this done? Well the Digibox is 'free' - of course it actually isn't it costs around 300 UKP. Now Sky doesn't actually pay for the boxes, a company called OPEN does - and they run all the online side of Sky's operation and build the operating environment on the STBs. They rely on a certain number of the customers using the charged for services that the Digibox can provide to make thier money back.
Canny independant dealers realised you could get the 'free' Digibox, hook it up to a good positioning dish and one cheap free to air system to go!
Hence the need to apply to Sky for the 'free' card and the reason for the memory wipe - not so long ago they closed down a company that sold an offboard backup system for thier Digiboxes because as well as great to save you the pain of reprograming after a power cut, it also bypassed thier 'wipe the memory' system.
This is what a major broadcasting company is doing in the UK - a country where we are used to free quality programming, and have a culture of regulation that tries (most of the time) to keep things fair.
I'd be very concerned over in the USA that your broadcasters don't just ram control into your front rooms.
Both these suggest the length of the Hindeburgh (apparently a development of the Zeppelin type) was 804 feet, and cruised at around 1000 feet - although it appears to be able to fly at a few thousand to avoid weather systems.
Now using 2 * pi * r to calculate the circumfrence of a circle with the radius as the altitude, and then divide by the length of the airframe, we can deduce that the arc of the length on the airship is:
So turning that into a more accessable figure that would be the same as 72 metre long object at a range of 100 metres - definately visable!!
[ sin 46 * 100 = 72 ]
Even if the bombers fly at 17000 feet the figures still suggest it would be potentailly visable:
2 * pi * 17000 = 106814
(804 / 106814) * 360 = 2.7 degrees
sin 2.7 * 100 = 4.7
So same as a 5 metre object at a range of 100m. That would still be visable to careful observation, although use of a disruption colour scheme would help it evade detection. Certainly not invisible.
For these Statolites, the figures would be:
18 metres is approx 60 feet
2 * pi * 18000 = 113097
(60 / 113097) * 360 = 5.3e-4 degrees
sin 5.3e-4 * 100 = 9.25e-4
Thats equivalent to an object of 1mm length at 100m - invisible to all intents and purposes.
As I understand it, solar, with fuel cells for power storage for night. Just like satellites
Fuel cells work by combining, usually, oxygen and hydrogen, releasing electricity and water. They are common on manned space flight because they provide drinking water and power, plus also a reliable energy dense form of electrical power. This ability to fullfill many roles and having no waste products makes them a good engineering solution, and they are highly robust.
However all fuel cells need as supply of gas to continue working. Conceiveably you can capture the waste water, electrolyse it and recompress the oxygen and hydrogen produced back to thier liquid forms for storage - but that is a highly complex bit of engineering.
As such satellites, to my knowledge, use batteries of various chemical regimes. I would expect the airships too as well - weight is not a huge problem on an airship as the envelope lifts pretty much what you want for 'free' unlike an aircraft where you have to expend energy to keep aloft, so normal chemical cell technology is a simpler engineering solution.
If cheap enough, this technology could replace the need for ALL large radio towers
As mentioned elsewhere these will not replace towers. Any tower that has one side connected to a landline (broadcast towers) will still have to be there. Any tower that boosts and retransmits (relay towers) could be replaced by this sort of idea, but some of those relay towers transmit at very high wattages - I question whether the solar collectors would be able to collect enough power to do the same. Especially, when accounting for daylight and losses in charging/regualtion systems on the battery bank, you probably need to achieve 3 times the rate of your energy consuption on your collection system. But certainly scenarios where you need a geographically wide coverage area at not a great power output, this idea could work very well.
But the crucial thing is that the airplanes have pilots, who by and large are able to react to any unusual state of affairs very quickly and effectively.
An autonomous system like the airships would need would not do that, even if there was some form of active monitoring by a ground based 'pilot' who could take over in the event of an emergency they are not physically there so may not be able to assess the emergency as well or as quickly as a pilot in an airplane. After all if there is a problem with the control surfaces on an airplane you have the chance of going into the cabin and actually seeing what is wrong rather than relying on instruments.
Additionally air flight paths are by and large routed away from major centers of popluation for that very reason, unless there is no alternative. The airships would require to be over populated areas to achieve thier tasks. Of course this leads to some interesting thoughts on exactly how the FAA(US)/CAA(UK) would view piloted and autonomous aircraft sharing airspace - would air traffic control be able to override the autonomous aircraft directly in an emergency, or would a ground based operator need to do it?
And my final thought is people are worried, probably rightly, by the safety of autonomous aircraft. We value life highly, so the level of safety engineering that goes into a piloted aircraft is much higher. If the aim is to provide cheap as possible autonomous systems, where all you lose is some money covered by insurance, then rightly we need to question if the safety engineering will be as high.
What is the british fascination with regulating everything? Seriously? De-regulation breeds innovation and competition. You may find it sleezy, but dammit part of living in a free society is letting people AND COMPANIES be free. They arent doing anything to your computer, you can turn off their ability to pop up ads at all (turn off javascripting) They are being creative. If they didnt do it, somebody else would have
1) Being British isn't the point - the adverts in your (I'm assuming US) juristiction carried by broadcast and print media have laws governing what they can and can't say.
2) A large amount of UK, and EU come to that, regulation is to do with enforcing fair competetion so that we don't get monopolies such as Bell.
3) Fraud and deception are criminal offences in most juristictions. For instance putting a false ATM cardreader up to skim card details is illegal - the crux of this case is by putting up a false dialogue box this is the same.
4) They are doing something to your computer - they are decieving you into installing thier software.
5) Turning off javascripting will make a large number of sites non-functional - this is the same level of advice as avoiding being in road traffic accidents by not driving - it works but its not practical.
6) People are not free to do what they want in society - if that was the case you would live in an anarchy not a democracy. Otherwise people would be free to kill you, free to walk into your home, free to take what they want. Free societies have responsibilites too.
Note I am not making a case against advertising - you are free to do that in anyway that is legal.
The idea was sold as 'second generation cordless' where you used the same phone at home with a base station on your land line, but it would work within 100m or so of a public hotspot - normally near payphone banks as these had the infrastructure and were in obvious places.
Never really took off as it lost a fight against the improving analogue mobile phone coverage and handset technology. Also if you took the handset with you when you were out, what were the other members of your family meant to use?
BT over here in the UK sold a similar product recently that was a GSM mobile, but with a DECT (Digital European Cordless Telephone originally, now Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) air interface as well, called Onephone. The idea being you could register it as a cordless handset with you DECT base station as well as have it on a GSM network.
When you made a call out it tried DECT first for lower call costs, and of course if you are in range of your landline it would ring as any other handset. It couldn't handover a call from system to the next as this was technically impossible and I have no idea what it did if it got a DECT call during a GSM call or vica versa.
To make it really useful BT sold a personal number service that would try you landline first, then try GSM to get through to the handset so you could give out a single contact number - but it was fairly expensive to rent.
Suprised that this idea hasn't been tried more often. But this is getting offtopic so a discusion for another day methinks...
The storage conditions are important too - there is a tract of Landsat data that is forever lost because one of the store rooms flooded and mildew killed the tapes.
Whats even more frustrating is where you have the tapes, but not the readers and machines to understand them. I understand some of the Apollo data may never be recovered because no-one thought to archive some of the tape mechanisms and computers at the time - something that is now done semi routinely at NASA
And then someone suggests that we use the generator to power the laptop so we don't need the battery anyway...
I mean there is just enough energy here to make sure the fluid in the heat pipe flows. When you have all the mechanical losses involved in the minature turbine and alternator, not to mention the heat generated by the turbine/alternator combination.
Then you have the problem of the fact that the output of the alternator will need rectifying and regulating as the speed varies according to heat load.
The you have issue to do with the noise generated by these mechanical devices.
And you have to do all this with tiny mechanical devices that will fit in a laptop.
It seems odd to come up with a system that can transport heat to a remote passive radiator in small form devices so, in an ideal world, you don't need a mechanical fan. And then use a tiny mechanical generating plant.
Don't get me wrong, an interesting thought experiment, but given the losses in power generation its not practical.
You are of course right - I should have been a little clearer.
There will probably never be repeaters in most local loops because the analogue voice circuit probably doesn't need it because the local loops are deployed so they are not needed, and consumers are not going to pay the costs of installing it. If you can pay that cost you may as well go get the leased line anyway.
Here in the UK a lot of cable is also underground to street cabinets - in this case physically you can't get anything else in there.
This is going to be a bit long but bear with me, I hope I can explain it a little.
The fundamental limit of high bandwidth technologies is due to the physical nature of copper wire.
Any digital signal is essentially a composition of a series of sine waves. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense - what happens is that the sharp 'edges' of a digital pulse are effectively very high frequency. So although it is conventient to think of a digital signal having a single frequency that is effectively the data rate, its not actually true.
One of the properties of copper wire is that different frequencies travel at different speeds in the wire, and get attenuated (lose power) at different rates.
Now we combine these two thoughts and what happens is that the well defined pulse get smeared as the frequencies that make them up seperate as the pulse goes down the line, and misshaped as attenuation kicks in. At some point this smearing will make it impossible to reconstruct the pulse. Also every single joint in the cable causes reflection of the siganl to some point.
In a transmission system this is not a problem, as the great thing with a digital signal is we know it only has two states - 1 or 0 - so we can regenerate and clean up the signal and transmit it again. This is what repeaters in undersea cables do (even fibre has to have these, but at much greater lengths than copper). But to your house there is no point in the cable to put a repeater - if the signal can be read when it gets to where you are then it works, if not then it doesn't.
Now in reality digital signals are not transmitted as a single stream of on/off pulses, but encoding systems are used that turn the signals into ranges of tones - which is why when you listen to you modem you here a range of tones, rather than a single one.
All of these techniques aim to minimise the effect of the smearing due to the different speeds the different frequencies travel, and to make the signal more resiliant to noise issues. But at some point either the pulses will become so corrupted they cannot be recognised, or the signal to noise ratio will get so bad that they can't be distinguished from noise.
Generally the problems get worse as the frequency goes up, and in data terms this is roughly the same as baud rate. This is why faster DSL rates are only available nearer the exchnage.
The reasons why ADSL2 isnt a great improvement is we are hitting fundamental limitations of copper wire transmission systems as used for analogue telephones (and it is analogue in the local loop no matter what the exchnage is) and tweaking the encoding techniques is not bringing great increases.
Remember with normal modems we hit the limit at 36Kbaud due to the fact that normal voice is limited to 0-4Khz - a bit of clever engineering managed to boost this to 56Kbaud on the downlink because you avoid one of the anti aliasing filters in the exchange.
So modems are limited to 4Khz and Shannons Law tells us the maximum data rate we can do at 4Khz, and 56Kbaud modems are damn near the limit.
ADSL is carried as a piggy back signal on your analogue line - below 4khz is the normal voice signal, above 25Khz is the ADSL signals. There is no 'hard' upper limit to ADSL due to filters like there is for voice, but there is a 'soft' limit where the problems discussed above mean its not possible to get reliable transmission.
Current ADSL is pretty close to those 'soft' limits - ADSL2 tweaks it a bit to get more in and increase the range.
The bad news is its not going to get much better on copper wire - the modem limit was due to filtering, but ADSL is down to basic physics.
Explanation of the local loop technologies - mostly found via ADSLGuide (These guys do a great job of keeping on top of UK ADSL issues)
The Last Mile - personal site, but a good heads up. Significantly shows the bandwidth limits as related to the type of wire the signal is transmitted down.
The Trouble With DSL great well written article that summarises some of the technical and practical issues with DSL.
Not engineering - roll out
on
New Look at ADSL2
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem isn't really in the engineering or design, but the roll out.
The most significant bit of any telco's network is 'the last mile' where the copper leaves the exchange and gets to your office or home.
There is one heck of a lot of these local loops, and replacing them with another media is no small job. So the solutions that will succeed and can be rolled out in a reasonable time and at a cost the consumers will pay has to be ones that can make the best use of the established transmission media that goes past your house.
Now this means cable modems and ADSL.
Wireless has its own set of problems if it is to become ubiqoutous - do we have the bandwidth when we are all sharing it - maybe we can have local sub exchanges that feed signal to our houses by fibre?
I don't know the answers, but anything that involves replacing the media to every customers home is going to take a long period of time and money to roll out. Replacing the local loop physical media will not in anyway make broadband cheap, more likely the opposite.
Right now you can get fast reliable connections by buying in a T1 leased line - but most people can't because you have to bear the cost of the telco installing the dedicated line yourself.
We have plenty of technologies right now that can bring mega bit levels to your home - if we were starting from scratch.
I'm not convinced that there is enough frequency spectrum to get mega bit broadband wireless to all. My money would be on a hybrid structure pushing the fibre networks further out to your house as and when networks are updated, and using local nodes and short copper runs like cable modems, or ideally push fibre into your homes in metropolitan areas, moving to wireless links where replacing physical transmission media become cost ineffective.
Range increase may be more promising.
on
New Look at ADSL2
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· Score: 5, Informative
Speaking as one of those in the UK sitting pretty much on the wrong side of the limit of the 5.5km restriction we have on British Telecom's ADSL implementation, the range increase may be more promising.
I'll hit the maths a bit -
Asssuming all the lines radiate directly out of the exchange so you can assume the range limit proscribes a circle with the exchange at the center (you can tell I'm a physicist can't you?)
The range increase talked about in the UK is 5.5km -> 6km of cable length. Now compare the areas of these 2 circles.
5.5 x 5.5 x 3.14 = 95 km squared (approx) 6.0 x 6.0 x 3.14 = 113 km squared (approx)
So this gives an extra 18 km squared coverage. If we assume one household per 100 metres squared (not unreasonable in the UK) then this bring 1800 homes in range of broadband.
Of course in the real world things will vary, but I've seen figures from BT suggesting 6km will bring 97% coverage of the population.
The irony for me is I live 30 miles from London, 4 miles from the end of the runway of one of our major airports, 3 miles from one of the major motorways and yet my broadband options are the same as someone on a remote island, no ADSL, no cable, just my trusty 56k jalopy...
I wonder why it's so hard to run an Ad supported website these days?
Because net advertising pretty much makes no money. Period. The world has changed and the response rate to Ads is terrible. Deal with it.
This kind of litigation makes me sick.
I'm sorry?
You support companies that earn money by decieving and defrauding the less well educated and skilled then?
You wouldn't want the laws of advertising that apply to print media and broadcast media to be applied online as well?
It doesn't bother you that a company lies to your site visitors to persuade them to install software on thier machines, so long as you get a couple of cents?
I agree it should not be up to a private company to press a class action for something that clearly should be investigated by the relevant government authority (ASA here in the UK), but at least something may be done about it.
They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET
Really - I don't read it that way at all. Looking at the notes about LINUX and XFree86 support It just refers to product families.
Now granted that ATI tends to sell a "RADEON 8500" and so there is confusion between the chipset and the product. But nowhere can I see and assertion that the drivers in question are either for or not for ATI Chipsets.
Now if they were released (to the public, reference drivers are almost always released to OEMs under NDAs) as reference drivers then that is a different thing. Reference drivers are for the chipset, if the OEM has correctly implemented the hardware, they will work, these drivers are used for reference, hence the name. The downside is that these may not use all the optional features of the chipset. Remember that one chipset can support a number of functions, and some of these are dependant on the OEM fitting the right support chips, the right speed memmory, the right connectors. If they differentiate in price the may choose not to do this.
If it doesn't say reference driver, then its not. Its made some assumptions about the hardware above and beyond the chipset. Depending on how close this is to the original reference drivers it might work, it might be flakey, it might just lock up.
So if you want performance you will need to look for a driver for the specific hardware, if you want stability then you should try and obtain reference drivers - thats why NVidia stuff is reasonably stable.
Remember the OEM manufactures the card for its own reasons - if it doesn't say 'supported by ' when you buy it you have no right to expect it to. Many cars are powered by Ford engines, I would not expect Ford to be able to fix the crash damage on my non-Ford car, but I would expect them to be able to service the engine. If you buy a Sapphire card for your Linux system, then make sure Sapphire provide the driver you need.
At what level does company X have an obligation to support its product sold through the OEM channel - after all you choose it, your supplier sold it, the distributer shipped it - all of these people all 'added value' to the supply chain. Many video card memory chips are made by Samsung, but clearly they will not be expected to provide a driver.
Yes the ATI logo is used - but it says 'Powered by ATI' - it does not say 'Compatible with ATI' although that is the assumption many consumers will make. Perhaps the fault there is shared.
Now be clear I'm not defending ATI here - this discussion is applicable to any hardware drivers. ATI is at fault here for the whole confusion about what this driver does and doesn't do, and what its logos do and don't mean. NVidia are much clearer, and feel it better to provide wider ranging support.
But it is important to understand that just becase hardware X uses chipset Y, then its not reasonable to expect a driver for Y to work with X - there is more differences between hardware than the name on the front of the box.
If that doesn't sound OS oriented, I don't know what does...
Granted.
With removable media there's an obvious place to put an index, to whit the root of the filesystem on the floppy/CD/DVD/memory card.
With a hard drive you probably need to think up a number of 'logical' places that relate to the user on that system. I'd be surprised if a Windows example wasn't there as that is the major OS that consumers use - I'm saddened that there isn't a corresponding example for MacOS and *NIX. Lets hope they are in the final issue.
They should get better proofreaders too. Section 11.5 starts with the heading "Finding an Photo/Video Manifest File"
Last time I checked, "an" was only used before words that started with a vowel or a vowel sound, such as the words Hour, or Image.
Seriously, I've read most of the links now on the OSTA site, and I can't see anything that looks like DRM.
Repeatedly all I can find is that this is hardware/OS independant, and that non 'MPV-aware' software/hardware will still play the media because its just an extension system, that it is royalty-free...
So what is this - well this is my interpretation:
This is a index and archiving approach, using XML as a metadata format to support the approach.
Currently on a CD/DVD you have the ISO9660 filesystem that tells the firmware/software the bare minimum to access the data.
MPV looks like it takes this a step further, similar to what Kodak did with the PhotoCD standard, so that aware applications can get access to a fast loading and more descriprive index of the media on the disk.
So its an evolution of the filesystem that supports media content rather than raw data files.
I don't see that it mandates a particular underlying file system, or file format, or DRM, or brand of hardware.
Its just a standard to provide and index so that 'MPV aware' software/hardware can understand the media better and do more with it. If you're not MPV aware - then you just get the data in the filesystem like you do today.
Now if you've ever tried to use something like Uleads Photo Explorer to find the image you want off your CD-R archive and waited whilst the drive thrashed through the whole 700MB to generate thumbnails, or tried to use WinOnCD to generate CD PhotoAlbums by a neat use of the VCD standards - then you will know that this is possible, but not the easiest it should be.
How much nicer would it be just to dump your images onto media with some notes and categories, and for it to just work, in your PC, on your folks DVD player, in your mates IMac, heck even your local tame guru's *NIX boxen?
And I'm a lot happier seeing this done by an organisation with a broad range of interests, software, hardware, industry, consumers etc. I don't want OS forcing this on me with thier own agenda - M$ or *NIX - I don't want Media Industry influenced hardware companies like Sony utting thier own spin on it.
If this is to succeed then it needs contributions from a wide range of sources, that will keep it balanced and open. Look at how common HTML has become under the care of the W3C - and it still by and large resists customisation and bending towards specific views because so many diverse interests are part of the process.
Lets not view every technology announcement as a modern day 'REDs under the BED'('DRM under the HOOD??') paranoia - yes lets keep our eyes out, and when we are worried DO SOMETHING rather than rant. But lets not let the actions of RIAA/Fritz/M$/MPAA et al colour our views of every new announcement - that way they win. Lets remember that spirit of 'gosh wow' that drove the early internet and gave us/.
I'm prepared to be wrong, but to paraphrase 'To a hammer every problem is a nail' lets not end up as 'To the slashdot community every announcement has hidden DRM'
The problem is, of course, that anything in the "lets add an 'e-' and call it a new paradigm" areana its written in giberish / politic-speak / market-speak to start with!
Now if anyone knows how to get sense in any language from that, let me know.
(Don't offer links to thinks that can translate language into gibberish - I have plenty of people in this office that can do that in thier sleep)
I don't think I ever said M$ was on my side - did I? Can you point it out to me? I make no comment on M$ being on my side. I mention that delivered secure code is a good thing - do you disagree?
Please actually read what I bother to write before firing up the "M$ Sucks Big Time" macros
I'm commenting on the fact that the Slashdot Editiorial is wrong.
Would you be as naive to believe everything written on Slashdot and not check the sources? I though not.
No M$ is on the side of M$ making the most money it can. Bad publicity can harm that, and public concern about security can do the same to M$ as Ralph Nader poiting out Ford Pinto's exploding petrol tank did to Ford.
And now you have my comment on M$ - still think I'm naive?
Any matter will radiate energy according to its temperature - you've heard of this as Black Body Radiation.
Now in remote sensing you are often working in the IR region, because
a) this is where the 'windows' in the atmospheres absorption curve are
b) comparision of two bands give us intresting information - eg NVDI tells us the approximate vegitation cover from a simple comparisson of 2 channels.
In this case the detector must be cooler then the thing it is observing, otherwise your detector will respond to radiation emitted by itself and the equipment around it.
In the case of astronomical CCDs a similar effect is at work. CCDs work by creating small pockets in silicon that work very much like capacitors. The energy of photons (light particles) striking the material causes charge to build up in these pockets.
When enough charge has built up you can then 'read' the charge level in a similar way you can read memory (though clearly with more than a binary state) and infer the brightness of each pixel from the charge level.
This is fine for Video/Digital Photography use as a short exposure gets plenty of photons and you have an image.
In astronomy however you take exposure on a timescale of hours, sometimes your image maybe formed from a handful of photons. The problem here is that thermal processes in the CCD material itself can also deposit charge in the pockets by causing small stray currents and from phonon interaction in the silicon lattice itself.
If you cool the CCD in a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you limit these thermal issues, and have long exposures. The cost comes from building electronics that can survive the thermal shock of going from 25 Centigrade to -197 Centigrade in 10 minutes or so, and also having very very high quality CCDs to start with.
Been there, done that to extend the life of the 16inch telescope at my old Uni.
BTW - its not just an astronomy issue, consumers are starting to see it in digital cameras, especially SLR replacements. Take a look at a long exposure and you will see speccles - this is in part due to dark current, and in part due to increasing the gain of the CCD to try and limit the exposure length and therefore dark current issues - a tricky balance to get right, and some are better than others.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you`d like to explain why Sky, the market leader in the U.K. has never been cracked
Care to explain that one?
I have seen and handled all in one homebrew cards for the Analogue system that worked look here
I have seen and handled cards that connected to a laptop to do decryption on the digital system - to be fair not working at the time I saw it.
You can also make attempts at cloning smartcards if you feel you're l33t enough try Cardman for some hardware - but don't please ask him *how* to do it - he got burned by some of the flack around the ITV Digital pirating issues and is now sticking firmly to just supplying hobbists tools to stay well clear of the allegations. Spend some time looking if it interests you.
One of the problems in broadcast systems is the system is only as secure as the people that run it. As soon as a disgruntled tech leaks some info about the encryption used then you have a chance to brute force it. Self authenticating systems are only secure when they can 'phone home' otherwise tech savvy consumers pop the lid off and start sticking the logic probes around the EPROMS - maybe this is why the Sky Digiboxes have to be connected to a live phone line or they have a paddy?
Now issues that do concern me with Sky is that the various broadcasting regulations in the UK mean that any digital reciever should be able to display free to air broadcast. This is because the operators with a license to broadcast nationally are obliged to carry the national stations (BBC) that people have already paid for through thier TV license. This is via cable / terrestrial or sat. They are also required to provide support for other broadcasters decrypt cards - this is designed to prevent monopolies by one company flooding the market with 'free' STB's - the ON Digital boxes mostly had two slots for a reason.
But on Sky the 'free to air' channels are encrypted - you have to apply for the 'free to air' decrypt card. And this is on the very boundry of breaking the conditions. There is also no capability of taking an extra decrypt card, nor as in the old analogue system adding an external decoder.
Additionally if the Digibox does not receive a signal from one of the Astra (Sky's own) series of satellites for a while then it resets its memory.
Why is this done? Well the Digibox is 'free' - of course it actually isn't it costs around 300 UKP. Now Sky doesn't actually pay for the boxes, a company called OPEN does - and they run all the online side of Sky's operation and build the operating environment on the STBs. They rely on a certain number of the customers using the charged for services that the Digibox can provide to make thier money back.
Canny independant dealers realised you could get the 'free' Digibox, hook it up to a good positioning dish and one cheap free to air system to go!
Hence the need to apply to Sky for the 'free' card and the reason for the memory wipe - not so long ago they closed down a company that sold an offboard backup system for thier Digiboxes because as well as great to save you the pain of reprograming after a power cut, it also bypassed thier 'wipe the memory' system.
This is what a major broadcasting company is doing in the UK - a country where we are used to free quality programming, and have a culture of regulation that tries (most of the time) to keep things fair.
I'd be very concerned over in the USA that your broadcasters don't just ram control into your front rooms.
I was intrigued so googled for some info. Two good reports of the Hindenburg I found here: www.hindenburg.net(google cache)
www.thirdreichforum.com(full accident report)
Both these suggest the length of the Hindeburgh (apparently a development of the Zeppelin type) was 804 feet, and cruised at around 1000 feet - although it appears to be able to fly at a few thousand to avoid weather systems.
Now using 2 * pi * r to calculate the circumfrence of a circle with the radius as the altitude, and then divide by the length of the airframe, we can deduce that the arc of the length on the airship is:
2 * pi * 1000 = 6283
(804 / 6283) * 360 = 46 degrees
So turning that into a more accessable figure that would be the same as 72 metre long object at a range of 100 metres - definately visable!!
[ sin 46 * 100 = 72 ]
Even if the bombers fly at 17000 feet the figures still suggest it would be potentailly visable:
2 * pi * 17000 = 106814
(804 / 106814) * 360 = 2.7 degrees
sin 2.7 * 100 = 4.7
So same as a 5 metre object at a range of 100m. That would still be visable to careful observation, although use of a disruption colour scheme would help it evade detection. Certainly not invisible.
For these Statolites, the figures would be:
18 metres is approx 60 feet
2 * pi * 18000 = 113097
(60 / 113097) * 360 = 5.3e-4 degrees
sin 5.3e-4 * 100 = 9.25e-4
Thats equivalent to an object of 1mm length at 100m - invisible to all intents and purposes.
As I understand it, solar, with fuel cells for power storage for night. Just like satellites
Fuel cells work by combining, usually, oxygen and hydrogen, releasing electricity and water. They are common on manned space flight because they provide drinking water and power, plus also a reliable energy dense form of electrical power. This ability to fullfill many roles and having no waste products makes them a good engineering solution, and they are highly robust.
However all fuel cells need as supply of gas to continue working. Conceiveably you can capture the waste water, electrolyse it and recompress the oxygen and hydrogen produced back to thier liquid forms for storage - but that is a highly complex bit of engineering.
As such satellites, to my knowledge, use batteries of various chemical regimes. I would expect the airships too as well - weight is not a huge problem on an airship as the envelope lifts pretty much what you want for 'free' unlike an aircraft where you have to expend energy to keep aloft, so normal chemical cell technology is a simpler engineering solution.
If cheap enough, this technology could replace the need for ALL large radio towers
As mentioned elsewhere these will not replace towers. Any tower that has one side connected to a landline (broadcast towers) will still have to be there. Any tower that boosts and retransmits (relay towers) could be replaced by this sort of idea, but some of those relay towers transmit at very high wattages - I question whether the solar collectors would be able to collect enough power to do the same. Especially, when accounting for daylight and losses in charging/regualtion systems on the battery bank, you probably need to achieve 3 times the rate of your energy consuption on your collection system. But certainly scenarios where you need a geographically wide coverage area at not a great power output, this idea could work very well.
But the crucial thing is that the airplanes have pilots, who by and large are able to react to any unusual state of affairs very quickly and effectively.
An autonomous system like the airships would need would not do that, even if there was some form of active monitoring by a ground based 'pilot' who could take over in the event of an emergency they are not physically there so may not be able to assess the emergency as well or as quickly as a pilot in an airplane. After all if there is a problem with the control surfaces on an airplane you have the chance of going into the cabin and actually seeing what is wrong rather than relying on instruments.
Additionally air flight paths are by and large routed away from major centers of popluation for that very reason, unless there is no alternative. The airships would require to be over populated areas to achieve thier tasks. Of course this leads to some interesting thoughts on exactly how the FAA(US)/CAA(UK) would view piloted and autonomous aircraft sharing airspace - would air traffic control be able to override the autonomous aircraft directly in an emergency, or would a ground based operator need to do it?
And my final thought is people are worried, probably rightly, by the safety of autonomous aircraft. We value life highly, so the level of safety engineering that goes into a piloted aircraft is much higher. If the aim is to provide cheap as possible autonomous systems, where all you lose is some money covered by insurance, then rightly we need to question if the safety engineering will be as high.
What is the british fascination with regulating everything? Seriously? De-regulation breeds innovation and competition. You may find it sleezy, but dammit part of living in a free society is letting people AND COMPANIES be free. They arent doing anything to your computer, you can turn off their ability to pop up ads at all (turn off javascripting) They are being creative. If they didnt do it, somebody else would have
1) Being British isn't the point - the adverts in your (I'm assuming US) juristiction carried by broadcast and print media have laws governing what they can and can't say.
2) A large amount of UK, and EU come to that, regulation is to do with enforcing fair competetion so that we don't get monopolies such as Bell.
3) Fraud and deception are criminal offences in most juristictions. For instance putting a false ATM cardreader up to skim card details is illegal - the crux of this case is by putting up a false dialogue box this is the same.
4) They are doing something to your computer - they are decieving you into installing thier software.
5) Turning off javascripting will make a large number of sites non-functional - this is the same level of advice as avoiding being in road traffic accidents by not driving - it works but its not practical.
6) People are not free to do what they want in society - if that was the case you would live in an anarchy not a democracy. Otherwise people would be free to kill you, free to walk into your home, free to take what they want. Free societies have responsibilites too.
Note I am not making a case against advertising - you are free to do that in anyway that is legal.
Rabbit were one of the other major operators.
The idea was sold as 'second generation cordless' where you used the same phone at home with a base station on your land line, but it would work within 100m or so of a public hotspot - normally near payphone banks as these had the infrastructure and were in obvious places.
Never really took off as it lost a fight against the improving analogue mobile phone coverage and handset technology. Also if you took the handset with you when you were out, what were the other members of your family meant to use?
BT over here in the UK sold a similar product recently that was a GSM mobile, but with a DECT (Digital European Cordless Telephone originally, now Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) air interface as well, called Onephone. The idea being you could register it as a cordless handset with you DECT base station as well as have it on a GSM network.
When you made a call out it tried DECT first for lower call costs, and of course if you are in range of your landline it would ring as any other handset. It couldn't handover a call from system to the next as this was technically impossible and I have no idea what it did if it got a DECT call during a GSM call or vica versa.
To make it really useful BT sold a personal number service that would try you landline first, then try GSM to get through to the handset so you could give out a single contact number - but it was fairly expensive to rent.
Suprised that this idea hasn't been tried more often. But this is getting offtopic so a discusion for another day methinks...
The storage conditions are important too - there is a tract of Landsat data that is forever lost because one of the store rooms flooded and mildew killed the tapes.
Whats even more frustrating is where you have the tapes, but not the readers and machines to understand them. I understand some of the Apollo data may never be recovered because no-one thought to archive some of the tape mechanisms and computers at the time - something that is now done semi routinely at NASA
Hmmm
And then someone suggests that we use the generator to power the laptop so we don't need the battery anyway...
I mean there is just enough energy here to make sure the fluid in the heat pipe flows. When you have all the mechanical losses involved in the minature turbine and alternator, not to mention the heat generated by the turbine/alternator combination.
Then you have the problem of the fact that the output of the alternator will need rectifying and regulating as the speed varies according to heat load.
The you have issue to do with the noise generated by these mechanical devices.
And you have to do all this with tiny mechanical devices that will fit in a laptop.
It seems odd to come up with a system that can transport heat to a remote passive radiator in small form devices so, in an ideal world, you don't need a mechanical fan. And then use a tiny mechanical generating plant.
Don't get me wrong, an interesting thought experiment, but given the losses in power generation its not practical.
You are of course right - I should have been a little clearer.
There will probably never be repeaters in most local loops because the analogue voice circuit probably doesn't need it because the local loops are deployed so they are not needed, and consumers are not going to pay the costs of installing it. If you can pay that cost you may as well go get the leased line anyway.
Here in the UK a lot of cable is also underground to street cabinets - in this case physically you can't get anything else in there.
This is going to be a bit long but bear with me, I hope I can explain it a little.
The fundamental limit of high bandwidth technologies is due to the physical nature of copper wire.
Any digital signal is essentially a composition of a series of sine waves. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense - what happens is that the sharp 'edges' of a digital pulse are effectively very high frequency. So although it is conventient to think of a digital signal having a single frequency that is effectively the data rate, its not actually true.
One of the properties of copper wire is that different frequencies travel at different speeds in the wire, and get attenuated (lose power) at different rates.
Now we combine these two thoughts and what happens is that the well defined pulse get smeared as the frequencies that make them up seperate as the pulse goes down the line, and misshaped as attenuation kicks in. At some point this smearing will make it impossible to reconstruct the pulse. Also every single joint in the cable causes reflection of the siganl to some point.
In a transmission system this is not a problem, as the great thing with a digital signal is we know it only has two states - 1 or 0 - so we can regenerate and clean up the signal and transmit it again. This is what repeaters in undersea cables do (even fibre has to have these, but at much greater lengths than copper). But to your house there is no point in the cable to put a repeater - if the signal can be read when it gets to where you are then it works, if not then it doesn't.
Now in reality digital signals are not transmitted as a single stream of on/off pulses, but encoding systems are used that turn the signals into ranges of tones - which is why when you listen to you modem you here a range of tones, rather than a single one.
All of these techniques aim to minimise the effect of the smearing due to the different speeds the different frequencies travel, and to make the signal more resiliant to noise issues. But at some point either the pulses will become so corrupted they cannot be recognised, or the signal to noise ratio will get so bad that they can't be distinguished from noise.
Generally the problems get worse as the frequency goes up, and in data terms this is roughly the same as baud rate. This is why faster DSL rates are only available nearer the exchnage.
The reasons why ADSL2 isnt a great improvement is we are hitting fundamental limitations of copper wire transmission systems as used for analogue telephones (and it is analogue in the local loop no matter what the exchnage is) and tweaking the encoding techniques is not bringing great increases.
Remember with normal modems we hit the limit at 36Kbaud due to the fact that normal voice is limited to 0-4Khz - a bit of clever engineering managed to boost this to 56Kbaud on the downlink because you avoid one of the anti aliasing filters in the exchange.
So modems are limited to 4Khz and Shannons Law tells us the maximum data rate we can do at 4Khz, and 56Kbaud modems are damn near the limit.
ADSL is carried as a piggy back signal on your analogue line - below 4khz is the normal voice signal, above 25Khz is the ADSL signals. There is no 'hard' upper limit to ADSL due to filters like there is for voice, but there is a 'soft' limit where the problems discussed above mean its not possible to get reliable transmission.
Current ADSL is pretty close to those 'soft' limits - ADSL2 tweaks it a bit to get more in and increase the range.
The bad news is its not going to get much better on copper wire - the modem limit was due to filtering, but ADSL is down to basic physics.
Explanation of the local loop technologies - mostly found via ADSLGuide (These guys do a great job of keeping on top of UK ADSL issues)
The Last Mile - personal site, but a good heads up. Significantly shows the bandwidth limits as related to the type of wire the signal is transmitted down.
The Trouble With DSL great well written article that summarises some of the technical and practical issues with DSL.
ADSL Techincal Summary
DSL Source Book - PDF (registration required) - very good for technical geeks.
The problem isn't really in the engineering or design, but the roll out.
The most significant bit of any telco's network is 'the last mile' where the copper leaves the exchange and gets to your office or home.
There is one heck of a lot of these local loops, and replacing them with another media is no small job. So the solutions that will succeed and can be rolled out in a reasonable time and at a cost the consumers will pay has to be ones that can make the best use of the established transmission media that goes past your house.
Now this means cable modems and ADSL.
Wireless has its own set of problems if it is to become ubiqoutous - do we have the bandwidth when we are all sharing it - maybe we can have local sub exchanges that feed signal to our houses by fibre?
I don't know the answers, but anything that involves replacing the media to every customers home is going to take a long period of time and money to roll out. Replacing the local loop physical media will not in anyway make broadband cheap, more likely the opposite.
Right now you can get fast reliable connections by buying in a T1 leased line - but most people can't because you have to bear the cost of the telco installing the dedicated line yourself.
We have plenty of technologies right now that can bring mega bit levels to your home - if we were starting from scratch.
I'm not convinced that there is enough frequency spectrum to get mega bit broadband wireless to all. My money would be on a hybrid structure pushing the fibre networks further out to your house as and when networks are updated, and using local nodes and short copper runs like cable modems, or ideally push fibre into your homes in metropolitan areas, moving to wireless links where replacing physical transmission media become cost ineffective.
Speaking as one of those in the UK sitting pretty much on the wrong side of the limit of the 5.5km restriction we have on British Telecom's ADSL implementation, the range increase may be more promising.
I'll hit the maths a bit -
Asssuming all the lines radiate directly out of the exchange so you can assume the range limit proscribes a circle with the exchange at the center (you can tell I'm a physicist can't you?)
The range increase talked about in the UK is 5.5km -> 6km of cable length. Now compare the areas of these 2 circles.
5.5 x 5.5 x 3.14 = 95 km squared (approx)
6.0 x 6.0 x 3.14 = 113 km squared (approx)
So this gives an extra 18 km squared coverage. If we assume one household per 100 metres squared (not unreasonable in the UK) then this bring 1800 homes in range of broadband.
Of course in the real world things will vary, but I've seen figures from BT suggesting 6km will bring 97% coverage of the population.
The irony for me is I live 30 miles from London, 4 miles from the end of the runway of one of our major airports, 3 miles from one of the major motorways and yet my broadband options are the same as someone on a remote island, no ADSL, no cable, just my trusty 56k jalopy...
I wonder why it's so hard to run an Ad supported website these days?
Because net advertising pretty much makes no money. Period. The world has changed and the response rate to Ads is terrible. Deal with it.
This kind of litigation makes me sick.
I'm sorry?
You support companies that earn money by decieving and defrauding the less well educated and skilled then?
You wouldn't want the laws of advertising that apply to print media and broadcast media to be applied online as well?
It doesn't bother you that a company lies to your site visitors to persuade them to install software on thier machines, so long as you get a couple of cents?
I agree it should not be up to a private company to press a class action for something that clearly should be investigated by the relevant government authority (ASA here in the UK), but at least something may be done about it.
They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET
Really - I don't read it that way at all. Looking at the notes about LINUX and XFree86 support It just refers to product families.
Now granted that ATI tends to sell a "RADEON 8500" and so there is confusion between the chipset and the product. But nowhere can I see and assertion that the drivers in question are either for or not for ATI Chipsets.
Now if they were released (to the public, reference drivers are almost always released to OEMs under NDAs) as reference drivers then that is a different thing. Reference drivers are for the chipset, if the OEM has correctly implemented the hardware, they will work, these drivers are used for reference, hence the name. The downside is that these may not use all the optional features of the chipset. Remember that one chipset can support a number of functions, and some of these are dependant on the OEM fitting the right support chips, the right speed memmory, the right connectors. If they differentiate in price the may choose not to do this.
If it doesn't say reference driver, then its not. Its made some assumptions about the hardware above and beyond the chipset. Depending on how close this is to the original reference drivers it might work, it might be flakey, it might just lock up.
So if you want performance you will need to look for a driver for the specific hardware, if you want stability then you should try and obtain reference drivers - thats why NVidia stuff is reasonably stable.
Remember the OEM manufactures the card for its own reasons - if it doesn't say 'supported by ' when you buy it you have no right to expect it to. Many cars are powered by Ford engines, I would not expect Ford to be able to fix the crash damage on my non-Ford car, but I would expect them to be able to service the engine. If you buy a Sapphire card for your Linux system, then make sure Sapphire provide the driver you need.
At what level does company X have an obligation to support its product sold through the OEM channel - after all you choose it, your supplier sold it, the distributer shipped it - all of these people all 'added value' to the supply chain. Many video card memory chips are made by Samsung, but clearly they will not be expected to provide a driver.
Yes the ATI logo is used - but it says 'Powered by ATI' - it does not say 'Compatible with ATI' although that is the assumption many consumers will make. Perhaps the fault there is shared.
Now be clear I'm not defending ATI here - this discussion is applicable to any hardware drivers. ATI is at fault here for the whole confusion about what this driver does and doesn't do, and what its logos do and don't mean. NVidia are much clearer, and feel it better to provide wider ranging support.
But it is important to understand that just becase hardware X uses chipset Y, then its not reasonable to expect a driver for Y to work with X - there is more differences between hardware than the name on the front of the box.
oxymoron
Close...
oxy^H^H^Hmoron
Closer...
He doesn't rule out fraud then *grin*
At the risk of starting a crazy, anyone seen any political spam yet - thats when I start to get worried.
That and some company in Canada is firmly convinced I want to buy 20 used 500 gallon stainless steel fermenting tanks - can't figure that one.
If that doesn't sound OS oriented, I don't know what does...
Granted.
With removable media there's an obvious place to put an index, to whit the root of the filesystem on the floppy/CD/DVD/memory card.
With a hard drive you probably need to think up a number of 'logical' places that relate to the user on that system. I'd be surprised if a Windows example wasn't there as that is the major OS that consumers use - I'm saddened that there isn't a corresponding example for MacOS and *NIX. Lets hope they are in the final issue.
They should get better proofreaders too. Section 11.5 starts with the heading "Finding an Photo/Video Manifest File"
Last time I checked, "an" was only used before words that started with a vowel or a vowel sound, such as the words Hour, or Image.
Amen to that.
TIFFs that wonderfully non-standard standard format :) I feel your pain after several years of processing sat image data...
That's always a danger where there are a number of things that you can embed in the format, and only a number of 'mandatory' sections.
But we've learnt - HTML works largely because stuff that clients don't understand is ignored, and good quality HTML degrades gracefully.
Seriously, I've read most of the links now on the OSTA site, and I can't see anything that looks like DRM.
/.
Repeatedly all I can find is that this is hardware/OS independant, and that non 'MPV-aware' software/hardware will still play the media because its just an extension system, that it is royalty-free...
So what is this - well this is my interpretation:
This is a index and archiving approach, using XML as a metadata format to support the approach.
Currently on a CD/DVD you have the ISO9660 filesystem that tells the firmware/software the bare minimum to access the data.
MPV looks like it takes this a step further, similar to what Kodak did with the PhotoCD standard, so that aware applications can get access to a fast loading and more descriprive index of the media on the disk.
So its an evolution of the filesystem that supports media content rather than raw data files.
I don't see that it mandates a particular underlying file system, or file format, or DRM, or brand of hardware.
Its just a standard to provide and index so that 'MPV aware' software/hardware can understand the media better and do more with it. If you're not MPV aware - then you just get the data in the filesystem like you do today.
Now if you've ever tried to use something like Uleads Photo Explorer to find the image you want off your CD-R archive and waited whilst the drive thrashed through the whole 700MB to generate thumbnails, or tried to use WinOnCD to generate CD PhotoAlbums by a neat use of the VCD standards - then you will know that this is possible, but not the easiest it should be.
How much nicer would it be just to dump your images onto media with some notes and categories, and for it to just work, in your PC, on your folks DVD player, in your mates IMac, heck even your local tame guru's *NIX boxen?
And I'm a lot happier seeing this done by an organisation with a broad range of interests, software, hardware, industry, consumers etc. I don't want OS forcing this on me with thier own agenda - M$ or *NIX - I don't want Media Industry influenced hardware companies like Sony utting thier own spin on it.
If this is to succeed then it needs contributions from a wide range of sources, that will keep it balanced and open. Look at how common HTML has become under the care of the W3C - and it still by and large resists customisation and bending towards specific views because so many diverse interests are part of the process.
Lets not view every technology announcement as a modern day 'REDs under the BED'('DRM under the HOOD??') paranoia - yes lets keep our eyes out, and when we are worried DO SOMETHING rather than rant. But lets not let the actions of RIAA/Fritz/M$/MPAA et al colour our views of every new announcement - that way they win. Lets remember that spirit of 'gosh wow' that drove the early internet and gave us
I'm prepared to be wrong, but to paraphrase 'To a hammer every problem is a nail' lets not end up as 'To the slashdot community every announcement has hidden DRM'
Thanks for that - for the life of me I couldn't get my head around how adaptive optics were working for solar imaging.
I thought you might be using very powerful laser - which sounded like a lot of fun!!
From what you describe it sounds more like a video system 'fuzzy logic' focus system, though I can appreciate that this is a much greater challenge!
I stand corrected - many thanks for that, I'll investigate! I just couldn't see how a low energy particle could generate the required magnetic field.
Sadly been reader of both for years - mark of the beast!
The problem is, of course, that anything in the "lets add an 'e-' and call it a new paradigm" areana its written in giberish / politic-speak / market-speak to start with! Now if anyone knows how to get sense in any language from that, let me know. (Don't offer links to thinks that can translate language into gibberish - I have plenty of people in this office that can do that in thier sleep)
I don't think I ever said M$ was on my side - did I? Can you point it out to me? I make no comment on M$ being on my side. I mention that delivered secure code is a good thing - do you disagree?
Please actually read what I bother to write before firing up the "M$ Sucks Big Time" macros
I'm commenting on the fact that the Slashdot Editiorial is wrong.
Would you be as naive to believe everything written on Slashdot and not check the sources? I though not.
No M$ is on the side of M$ making the most money it can. Bad publicity can harm that, and public concern about security can do the same to M$ as Ralph Nader poiting out Ford Pinto's exploding petrol tank did to Ford.
And now you have my comment on M$ - still think I'm naive?
No - Dark Current is very very well understood!
Any matter will radiate energy according to its temperature - you've heard of this as Black Body Radiation.
Now in remote sensing you are often working in the IR region, because
a) this is where the 'windows' in the atmospheres absorption curve are
b) comparision of two bands give us intresting information - eg NVDI tells us the approximate vegitation cover from a simple comparisson of 2 channels.
In this case the detector must be cooler then the thing it is observing, otherwise your detector will respond to radiation emitted by itself and the equipment around it.
In the case of astronomical CCDs a similar effect is at work. CCDs work by creating small pockets in silicon that work very much like capacitors. The energy of photons (light particles) striking the material causes charge to build up in these pockets.
When enough charge has built up you can then 'read' the charge level in a similar way you can read memory (though clearly with more than a binary state) and infer the brightness of each pixel from the charge level.
This is fine for Video/Digital Photography use as a short exposure gets plenty of photons and you have an image.
In astronomy however you take exposure on a timescale of hours, sometimes your image maybe formed from a handful of photons. The problem here is that thermal processes in the CCD material itself can also deposit charge in the pockets by causing small stray currents and from phonon interaction in the silicon lattice itself.
If you cool the CCD in a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you limit these thermal issues, and have long exposures. The cost comes from building electronics that can survive the thermal shock of going from 25 Centigrade to -197 Centigrade in 10 minutes or so, and also having very very high quality CCDs to start with.
Been there, done that to extend the life of the 16inch telescope at my old Uni.
BTW - its not just an astronomy issue, consumers are starting to see it in digital cameras, especially SLR replacements. Take a look at a long exposure and you will see speccles - this is in part due to dark current, and in part due to increasing the gain of the CCD to try and limit the exposure length and therefore dark current issues - a tricky balance to get right, and some are better than others.
I agree with everything you say.
But my point was the editorial was not a correct representation of the facts. And therefore we are criticising M$ on heresay.
If it had said what you said, you'd have seen me there with the pitchforks and burning torches pitching in to help!