That's likely not possible anymore. Back when TechTV was in its nine-hour TechLive mode they were purely a talking heads station, but they since have been forced to change their format into a "tech lifestyle" channel with geek-friendly shows such as Robot Wars and geeky documentaries. TechTV used to be compariable to a news station, but now they're more of an entertainment station. At least core shows such as The Screen Savers, Fresh Gear and a 30-minute edition of TechLive have survived (although in clearly modified forms) rather than being lost with the whole channel. Still, news-heavy shows such as Silicon Spin have been discarded.
Headline News has been offered to radio stations ever the mid-90s as a time filler. At the time, script writers were instructed not to use phrase constructions that mention the video content like "In this picture here" or "As you see on your screen" because there would be some listeners who would need the video image described to them. In fact, CNET Radio used Headline News its overnight and weekend time-filler in its 24-hour days. As radio use of CNN-HN has become less common, they've since slipped up and allowed anchors to say "We're going to drop the ticker now to let you watch..." even though XM and Sirius listeners have no tickers to lose.
The market for tech news just isn't that big. The market for tech-business news went from huge to zero when the bubble burst.
And there lies the rub. In order for a niche-market Internet radio station to make it to XM, it has to serve a large enough audience to be able to attract the funding in order to ensure an nearly-always-up operation. But then, they're no longer a niche station, because they have to respond to the needs of many instead of just a few. They're suddenly popular enough to not be a niche station... and jumping the shark they go.
It just can't happen. Small-time content gets influenced by making it to the big-time... it just wouldn't be the same.
TechTV personalites can cause long lines for autograph signings nearly anywhere in the nation, but in their home town of San Fran they actually can walk around town without being recognized. Surprisingly, they're not really popular in the Bay Area, which I think was a contributing factor to CNET Radio's demise.
Television is scheduled very differently than radio. If you want to see "The Simpsons", you have to be watching at the appointed hour. If you want "The Simpsons" Sunday morning at 10am, you're out of luck unless you have a TiVo.
Radio however, doesn't change as much. Kiss 108 is Kiss 108 all through the day. K-Rock is K-Rock all through the day. There's subtile changes in the morning where there's a little more talk and traffic info, and in the night where the more offensive content can come out to play, but not dramatic program changes like you see every half hour on TV. That's why TiVo's a whole lot more useful for TV than radio.
That seems to be one of XM's talents. The less you know about what's really going on behind the curtain, the more you are entertained. Who cares if the program on one channel now was the same program that was heard six hours ago on another channel... hardly anybody listening to this channel now was listening to that channel then so it's all new to them.:)
XM tries hard to maintain that "connection" with its listeners. They realize each station is being heard about a college station's worth of audience at any given moment... take the number of XM radios, subtract those turned off at any given moment, and divide by the number of formats on the service.
The fact that the business model of the service has them more loyal to their listeners than their sponsors lead to some very interesting music selections and responses to listener requests...
TiVoRadio would kinda defeat the purpose of radio.
"Radio" is in part designed to deliver a stream of music that you don't control because there's program directors behind the scenes who have the job of determining what mix of music the listeners who like their format want to hear, which is what defines their format. That is to say, how would you know that you like (your favorite artist here) if it wasn't for the existance of a radio service of some kind? You're just gonna read about them? No, you need to hear their music without knowing you need to request to hear them. That's the purpose of "radio".
You'll also notice that "radio" services are priced much differently by the content owners because of that samplingly and lack of control feature. Basically, we have TiVo radio in the form of the iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com... and more or less the price of getting a song that way is just a little bit less than the price of getting the same song on CD. Meanwhile, satellite radio is about the price of one CD for a whole month of access to about 100 channels. Big difference in prices there...
The 24-hour CNET Radio died quite a while ago. CNET no longer controls 910 KNEW Oakland or 890 WBPS, and the web stream has been kicked back to the semi-regular 5-minute bursts that they had back when they first started.
The "CNET Radio channel" on XM is now David Lawrence's 3-hour synidcated show (that CNET never owned, they just rented) called Online Tonight and that's it. The same 3 hour show repeated 8 times a day.:)... It's a ghost of its former self and is just screaming for XM to consolidate Online Tonight into one of its other talk formats to free up the channel slot. They'll likely do it the next time they realign the channels, but since that's only happened once so far it's hard to tell when they'll do that again.
Traditional triangulation is done with vectors, under the theory that two lines can only intersect at one point, and if a third vector line crosses at the same point then a checksum agrees the result.
So, while one access point saying "it could be 5, 13 or 35 feet away" is very little information, combining that with a second access point's information will draw another set of concentric circles, and there's going to be a limited number of intersect points. Add in a third set of circles and hope that the transmitter moves a little, and it's very possible to "lock on" to one coordinate and follow the nearest overlap point as it moves around.
Well, such a system, in theory, would have at at least be able to detect monkey business when it sees it...
A yagi from miles away would hit one access point, and only one access point. However, this system requires that all authorized transmitters hit at least two if not three access points. It's going to be sure where this person is, but it can be sure where this person isn't... Remember, the first step in dealing with a hack is realizing you've been hacked. The hacker's traffic flags itself for attention this way.
A multi-antenna setup might stand a chance of properly simulating a spot on the map by sending the right signal strengths to the right access points. However, that ruse would have one critcal weakness... a physical check of the spot being highlighted on the map would find no user there. Again, no accurate clue as to where the hacker is coming from, but a definite indication that there is a hacker. Any other combination would result in a combination of signal strengths that result in an inability to resolve to a point, but that again results in a sign of trouble.
Yeah, this system could be fooled... but coloring outside the lines would at least draw attention to a problem.
Why do the known points have to be relative to GPS? Calibration relative to known points on the office property is good enough... there's a lot of knowledge in knowing if a user is in the warehouse or the parking lot next to the warehouse.
GPRS and WiFi are not the same thing. GPRS covers a large area from a single point, WiFi has smaller range but much higher bandwidth.
Simple e-mail checking over GPRS will work just fine, but streaming media or rich-content web sites will not. It's an apples-and-oranges comparison to make...
As for bandwidth hogs, if I'm in a small coffee shop which has 1Mbit DSL or 1.5Mbit, cable.... Right now I'm only going to see 4 - 6 people using laptops. Are all of them sitting on Kazaa downloading porn? That takes too long. I don't want to sit in a coffee shop doing that for 18 hours.
Who says they have to sit in the coffee shop to mooch the bandwidth? Anybody with radio line-of-sight can...
WiFi enabling a place like a cafe costs almost nothing.
Unfortunately, that's a factoid. It looks true, but it's not.
You can set up a wide-open WiFi for next to nothing. But, really you can't. You'll trip over your ISP's terms of service, and they'll hold you responsible when somebody starts spamming from your bandwidth or downloading copyrighted material...
You can set up a secured WiFi point, but then you'll need to hire somebody to run that. Suddenly not so free anymore...
Because eventually those unsecured networks will get discovered by spammers, downloaders, or other bandwidth hogs, and suddenly they'll either become secured or have their plug pulled by the ISP. (Using consumer-priced bandwidth to provide service to others is a violation of nearly every TOS.) It's not a matter of the corperate interests taking over what used to be free, it's a result of the people giving away bandwidth for free figuring out that it never was that smart of an idea in the first place...
If the sudial's positioning gets screwed up while landing or on Mars, though, then a whole new host of problems spring up...
They're expecting the sundial's starting position to be random... nobody can predict how the craft is going to bounce during the landing. However, they're sure that they're going to be able to get the thing pointed upwards, and then after a Mars-day of watching the sun cross it they'll be able to solve for Mars-North and then lazer-etch markings into it.
Re:It is Good Bill Nye is Still Doing Science
on
Bill Nye's Marsdial
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Bill Nye's formal background is more as a comic actor than a scientist. "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" was a character he first used on "Almost Live!" which was a Seattle local show that at the peak of its run was syndicated nationally. Pat Cashman, with his deep announcer voice, was also an Almost Live! cast member and is seen frequently on Nye's show as well.
Nye was always interested in science, and as a result he made sure that his Bill Nye: The Science Guy show was accurate and at lot of influence in the direction of the show. Yet, he really doesn't have any science research cred, he's a broadcaster who knows how to present grade-school level topics in a way that most people can understand.
His sundial idea is just a little too simplistic for NASA to have come up with on their own, which is why they initially rejected it. However, there is valid science because a sundial will always give you a fairly accurate way to tell time no matter which planet in the solar system you're on, and also a valid way to solve for orientation. Two things that previous missions may have stumbled over... a checksum is a very nice thing to have sometimes...
You definitely can heat up a tank with liquid oxygen when there's a risk of ice... if it's that cold, there's no risk of the tank becoming too hot. The cool thing is, heaters can be turned off when you don't want them on.:)
OnStar uses the ANALOG cell-phone networks... which also means that as providers phase out analog service OnStar's going to have more and more dark spots.
One way to assure that the customer is getting binaries that corrispond to the source in escrow would be to have the code given to the escrow company by the vendor, and then have the client pick up the binary directly from the escrow company... therefore delivering binaries that don't match the code would be impossible. Of course, the vendor should do they test-complies against the escrow's compiler to assure they work, but once there's a "release" the code is locked away at the escrow and the client gets the resulting binary with no room for monkey business on the way there.
The problem with that is it involves bringing in a developer to look at the "secret" code. Sure, that's what an NDA is for, but you can only sue an NDA violator for what he has. A multi-million dollar company putting it's most valuable secret into the hands of somebody who doesn't have a million to be sued out of is a big risk, one that's bound to come up craps for somebody.
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That's likely not possible anymore. Back when TechTV was in its nine-hour TechLive mode they were purely a talking heads station, but they since have been forced to change their format into a "tech lifestyle" channel with geek-friendly shows such as Robot Wars and geeky documentaries. TechTV used to be compariable to a news station, but now they're more of an entertainment station. At least core shows such as The Screen Savers, Fresh Gear and a 30-minute edition of TechLive have survived (although in clearly modified forms) rather than being lost with the whole channel. Still, news-heavy shows such as Silicon Spin have been discarded.
Headline News has been offered to radio stations ever the mid-90s as a time filler. At the time, script writers were instructed not to use phrase constructions that mention the video content like "In this picture here" or "As you see on your screen" because there would be some listeners who would need the video image described to them. In fact, CNET Radio used Headline News its overnight and weekend time-filler in its 24-hour days. As radio use of CNN-HN has become less common, they've since slipped up and allowed anchors to say "We're going to drop the ticker now to let you watch..." even though XM and Sirius listeners have no tickers to lose.
The market for tech news just isn't that big. The market for tech-business news went from huge to zero when the bubble burst.
And there lies the rub. In order for a niche-market Internet radio station to make it to XM, it has to serve a large enough audience to be able to attract the funding in order to ensure an nearly-always-up operation. But then, they're no longer a niche station, because they have to respond to the needs of many instead of just a few. They're suddenly popular enough to not be a niche station... and jumping the shark they go.
It just can't happen. Small-time content gets influenced by making it to the big-time... it just wouldn't be the same.
TechTV personalites can cause long lines for autograph signings nearly anywhere in the nation, but in their home town of San Fran they actually can walk around town without being recognized. Surprisingly, they're not really popular in the Bay Area, which I think was a contributing factor to CNET Radio's demise.
The problem with niche stations becoming popular is that once they are popular they're no longer niche stations anymore. :)
Television is scheduled very differently than radio. If you want to see "The Simpsons", you have to be watching at the appointed hour. If you want "The Simpsons" Sunday morning at 10am, you're out of luck unless you have a TiVo.
Radio however, doesn't change as much. Kiss 108 is Kiss 108 all through the day. K-Rock is K-Rock all through the day. There's subtile changes in the morning where there's a little more talk and traffic info, and in the night where the more offensive content can come out to play, but not dramatic program changes like you see every half hour on TV. That's why TiVo's a whole lot more useful for TV than radio.
That seems to be one of XM's talents. The less you know about what's really going on behind the curtain, the more you are entertained. Who cares if the program on one channel now was the same program that was heard six hours ago on another channel... hardly anybody listening to this channel now was listening to that channel then so it's all new to them. :)
XM tries hard to maintain that "connection" with its listeners. They realize each station is being heard about a college station's worth of audience at any given moment... take the number of XM radios, subtract those turned off at any given moment, and divide by the number of formats on the service.
The fact that the business model of the service has them more loyal to their listeners than their sponsors lead to some very interesting music selections and responses to listener requests...
TiVoRadio would kinda defeat the purpose of radio.
"Radio" is in part designed to deliver a stream of music that you don't control because there's program directors behind the scenes who have the job of determining what mix of music the listeners who like their format want to hear, which is what defines their format. That is to say, how would you know that you like (your favorite artist here) if it wasn't for the existance of a radio service of some kind? You're just gonna read about them? No, you need to hear their music without knowing you need to request to hear them. That's the purpose of "radio".
You'll also notice that "radio" services are priced much differently by the content owners because of that samplingly and lack of control feature. Basically, we have TiVo radio in the form of the iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com... and more or less the price of getting a song that way is just a little bit less than the price of getting the same song on CD. Meanwhile, satellite radio is about the price of one CD for a whole month of access to about 100 channels. Big difference in prices there...
The 24-hour CNET Radio died quite a while ago. CNET no longer controls 910 KNEW Oakland or 890 WBPS, and the web stream has been kicked back to the semi-regular 5-minute bursts that they had back when they first started.
:)... It's a ghost of its former self and is just screaming for XM to consolidate Online Tonight into one of its other talk formats to free up the channel slot. They'll likely do it the next time they realign the channels, but since that's only happened once so far it's hard to tell when they'll do that again.
The "CNET Radio channel" on XM is now David Lawrence's 3-hour synidcated show (that CNET never owned, they just rented) called Online Tonight and that's it. The same 3 hour show repeated 8 times a day.
The problem is, "teleporting" could be defined as turning off, moving, and turning on again... kinda hard to prohibit that.
Traditional triangulation is done with vectors, under the theory that two lines can only intersect at one point, and if a third vector line crosses at the same point then a checksum agrees the result.
So, while one access point saying "it could be 5, 13 or 35 feet away" is very little information, combining that with a second access point's information will draw another set of concentric circles, and there's going to be a limited number of intersect points. Add in a third set of circles and hope that the transmitter moves a little, and it's very possible to "lock on" to one coordinate and follow the nearest overlap point as it moves around.
Well, such a system, in theory, would have at at least be able to detect monkey business when it sees it...
A yagi from miles away would hit one access point, and only one access point. However, this system requires that all authorized transmitters hit at least two if not three access points. It's going to be sure where this person is, but it can be sure where this person isn't... Remember, the first step in dealing with a hack is realizing you've been hacked. The hacker's traffic flags itself for attention this way.
A multi-antenna setup might stand a chance of properly simulating a spot on the map by sending the right signal strengths to the right access points. However, that ruse would have one critcal weakness... a physical check of the spot being highlighted on the map would find no user there. Again, no accurate clue as to where the hacker is coming from, but a definite indication that there is a hacker. Any other combination would result in a combination of signal strengths that result in an inability to resolve to a point, but that again results in a sign of trouble.
Yeah, this system could be fooled... but coloring outside the lines would at least draw attention to a problem.
Why do the known points have to be relative to GPS? Calibration relative to known points on the office property is good enough... there's a lot of knowledge in knowing if a user is in the warehouse or the parking lot next to the warehouse.
How many coffee shop owners know that port 25 equates to SMTP?
And also at places like airports where there's no possiblity of residential WiFi to mooch off of...
GPRS and WiFi are not the same thing. GPRS covers a large area from a single point, WiFi has smaller range but much higher bandwidth.
Simple e-mail checking over GPRS will work just fine, but streaming media or rich-content web sites will not. It's an apples-and-oranges comparison to make...
As for bandwidth hogs, if I'm in a small coffee shop which has 1Mbit DSL or 1.5Mbit, cable.... Right now I'm only going to see 4 - 6 people using laptops. Are all of them sitting on Kazaa downloading porn? That takes too long. I don't want to sit in a coffee shop doing that for 18 hours.
Who says they have to sit in the coffee shop to mooch the bandwidth? Anybody with radio line-of-sight can...
WiFi enabling a place like a cafe costs almost nothing.
Unfortunately, that's a factoid. It looks true, but it's not.
You can set up a wide-open WiFi for next to nothing. But, really you can't. You'll trip over your ISP's terms of service, and they'll hold you responsible when somebody starts spamming from your bandwidth or downloading copyrighted material...
You can set up a secured WiFi point, but then you'll need to hire somebody to run that. Suddenly not so free anymore...
Because eventually those unsecured networks will get discovered by spammers, downloaders, or other bandwidth hogs, and suddenly they'll either become secured or have their plug pulled by the ISP. (Using consumer-priced bandwidth to provide service to others is a violation of nearly every TOS.) It's not a matter of the corperate interests taking over what used to be free, it's a result of the people giving away bandwidth for free figuring out that it never was that smart of an idea in the first place...
If the sudial's positioning gets screwed up while landing or on Mars, though, then a whole new host of problems spring up...
They're expecting the sundial's starting position to be random... nobody can predict how the craft is going to bounce during the landing. However, they're sure that they're going to be able to get the thing pointed upwards, and then after a Mars-day of watching the sun cross it they'll be able to solve for Mars-North and then lazer-etch markings into it.
Bill Nye's formal background is more as a comic actor than a scientist. "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" was a character he first used on "Almost Live!" which was a Seattle local show that at the peak of its run was syndicated nationally. Pat Cashman, with his deep announcer voice, was also an Almost Live! cast member and is seen frequently on Nye's show as well. Nye was always interested in science, and as a result he made sure that his Bill Nye: The Science Guy show was accurate and at lot of influence in the direction of the show. Yet, he really doesn't have any science research cred, he's a broadcaster who knows how to present grade-school level topics in a way that most people can understand. His sundial idea is just a little too simplistic for NASA to have come up with on their own, which is why they initially rejected it. However, there is valid science because a sundial will always give you a fairly accurate way to tell time no matter which planet in the solar system you're on, and also a valid way to solve for orientation. Two things that previous missions may have stumbled over... a checksum is a very nice thing to have sometimes...
You definitely can heat up a tank with liquid oxygen when there's a risk of ice... if it's that cold, there's no risk of the tank becoming too hot. The cool thing is, heaters can be turned off when you don't want them on. :)
OnStar uses the ANALOG cell-phone networks... which also means that as providers phase out analog service OnStar's going to have more and more dark spots.
One way to assure that the customer is getting binaries that corrispond to the source in escrow would be to have the code given to the escrow company by the vendor, and then have the client pick up the binary directly from the escrow company... therefore delivering binaries that don't match the code would be impossible. Of course, the vendor should do they test-complies against the escrow's compiler to assure they work, but once there's a "release" the code is locked away at the escrow and the client gets the resulting binary with no room for monkey business on the way there.
The problem with that is it involves bringing in a developer to look at the "secret" code. Sure, that's what an NDA is for, but you can only sue an NDA violator for what he has. A multi-million dollar company putting it's most valuable secret into the hands of somebody who doesn't have a million to be sued out of is a big risk, one that's bound to come up craps for somebody.