Don't have to worry about someone keying your car?? depends where you live, sometimes I think my car would be safer in a mega parking lot than in my own street.
Off topic I know
But definately agreed, the mega theatres are trying to attract young people, although this definately contradicts with their prices!!! (student tickets are usually only a fraction less than full price these days).
Its great for once to see people living in the USA feeling like us in the "rest of the world" do with most technology advances.
I'm a pretty close follower of mobile phone news and developments, and what the USA is going through right now is exactly what Australia and I guess most other GSM based countries went through about 2-3 years ago. Users started realising that contracts weren't such a great idea and people like Vodafone (especially vodafone) started encouraging pre-paid plans. This lead to people buying phones outright, which meant more retailers, more choice, better phones.
Its the same with number portability and SMS, the USA is just 2-3 years behind the rest of the world in terms of mobile phone usage.
Take a trip to Italy, users there have at least 2 sim cards/providers in use CONSTANTLY - either two phones, or just constant swapping of sim cards. The providers (like Vodafone once again) get used to it and cater for it - for example, in Italy, if you ring someone and their phone is unavailable (ie they have a different sim card in) you can simply get the system to SMS you when they are back online. Its simple, but is convenient for users and encourages more calls (good for operators).
Actually, with the solution that AT+T has chosen, there is barely any lag between changing channels. The Microsoft TV solution (see brochure has a concept called "Instant Channel Change". I can't tell you how it works, but I can tell you i've seen it, used it and it does work, and its pretty damn fast.
No one seems to have even mentioned Spam filters yet. I am finding these increasingly disruptive in my regular work related communications. It's bad enough that my work email (from a respectable domain name) is immediately spam trapped by yahoo accounts, but it is even worse when I simply don't receive email from clients or partner companies because the spam filter has eradicated the email!
What's more, unlike the useful free accounts such as gmail and yahoo that often put suspect mail into a spam box, I have no access or knowledge of what the spam filter is destroying - so emails aren't received, customers get cranky and information is lost, time is wasted. I'm sure there must be others who feel the pain of spam filters both at work and home.
Last time I checked, iiNet in Australia only has ADSL2 enabled (not ADSL2+) which is why the max for iiNet is 12Mbit down. Although, ADSL2 has some reach-extend variants that can be enabled to help those further from the exchange.
The big issue is the provider's IP and aggregation network. Around the world for DSL internet services, these only provide 30-50Kbit/s average per user. A LONG way from the 20 or so Mbit being offered on the access portion of the network (from your exchange to your house). This is why large scale streaming video deployments on these networks (ones with 10Mbit+ to the house) are non existant.
The back haul networks are expensive, hence the pissy little bandwidths.
Yes, Xvid and Divx are MPEG4 standards, but just to make things confusing, they are only the 'start' of MPEG4 (MPEG4 encompasses heaps of different things, including meta data specs, etc).
H.264 is MPEG4 Advanced Codec (MPEG4 part 10) and uses basically every trick in the book to give you FANTASTIC looking video in low bit rates.
Although, H.264 isnt widely available yet, WMV9 is, and hence has a jump start.
Apple's Tiger OS has H.264 in it and you can now get a preview (if ur a 'select' member of the developer program). So do your best to find some H.264 samples, and you will be truly amazed at how much better it is than divx/xvid.
The biggest difference i find between remote desktop and VNC (i use Real) is that remote desktop actually starts a seperate login session, different to the one actually visible on the monitor. It tends to be more stable and have more accurate video, HOWEVER if you want to control what is actually on the monitor in the current windows session, VNC is the answer. I use it to drive presentations (video and powerpoint) on a PC connected to a projector, from the back of the presentation room. Very handy - also good if you want to show someone how to fix something on their PC.
In Australia, our biggest selling car, the Holden Commodore (General Motors) is already fitted with a simple form of black box that is able to tell accident investigators the speed travelled and throttle/brake use for the past few seconds before impact.
The information has been used in at least 1 court case I know of since it has been around.
Well trying BT with Nokia handsets (and windows for that matter) no wonder you had problems. Nokia has some of the worst BT implementation I have ever seen - they just havent got it right yet, not by a long shot.
Most of their phones only seem to support the headset profile to start with. So no file transfers or syncs to other standard software/devices/phones.
Multicast is very uncommonly supported in the Internet/ISP world at the moment, mainly because most ISPs would not see a need for it. However, as video on broadband grows and gets serious, multicast is the only efficient and cost effective way of delivering it to many people. So once the isp's start to realise this and find a use for it (ie broadcasting their own video content and charging for it) will we see it in common place. Of course all the intermediate routers in the internet must be allowed to either tunnel or replicate the traffic (DVMRP is probably the most common multicast routing protocol). Also, IGMP which is the protocol used for requesting multicast streams, although in its 3rd iteration, is far from secure or reliable - and the bigger problem is, most network equipment, especially in the access leg of broadband (ie: DSL) only supports version 2 of IGMP, and although compatability is kinda built in - in practice its difficult to get workingi across all platforms, all modems, etc reliably.
Trust me, its hard, its part of my job.
Re:(north) American cousins - get on board
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: 2, Funny
How would it make you better off in Australia?
Well it would mean maybe one day once all imperial had dissapeared, we would only have ONE set of socket wrenches...
and plus all the crocodiles would sound shorter, as they would only be 2 metres instead of 6 feet!
I worked with HP/Compaq stuff for a while, and in this case, if you just use the win XP "system" cd without the recovery cd, it works but you end up with practically no drivers for the system (like display, sound, etc) and plus they somehow made it so that that XP cd wont work in a non HP machine either, so its not really a REAL win XP cd... quasi xp cd.
It also looks like the tram could play a role in the Universal Studios back lot tour, smashing through fake walls and stuff as the blurb says... a million and one uses:)
This may sound silly, but how cool would it be to have some kind of wireless cabling system for connection between all pc devices (like bluetooth) i know its totaly inpracticle, but u could have one of those cool induction charging matts with a motherboard, hard drive, cdrom, etc just sitting on it with no wires! very trippy 8-)
Well from my perspective (Australia) GSM is king, sure we have CDMA too (the *new* analogue) but gsm has been around about 4 times longer, so therefore has the largest install base of mobiles and towers, and plus with 1800 micro cells in the city, GSM offers the best overall coverage pretty much anywhere you would want to go, including europe, asia and even the US (where i understand with a triband phone (incl 1900Mhz) you can call from pretty much any city u would like to go in the US)
These days if your worried about reception you could always grab one of those LEO satellite phones that can also connect to GSM, ericsson makes those too i believe.
You'll find that with any circuit board dropped in water, although it may work for a little while, it will still become liquid ingressed and the corrosion will continue to seep across the board leading to its eventual and terminal demise, but somehow (from experience repairing Fuji digi cams) companies will replace or repair the item under warranty if you winge enough (it fell into the water of its own accord! i promise!)
Slashdot Mirror
Just as well you didnt have a WMD in there, it could have exploded/leaked/bled all over everyone at the airport...
Off topic I know
But definately agreed, the mega theatres are trying to attract young people, although this definately contradicts with their prices!!! (student tickets are usually only a fraction less than full price these days).
Its great for once to see people living in the USA feeling like us in the "rest of the world" do with most technology advances.
I'm a pretty close follower of mobile phone news and developments, and what the USA is going through right now is exactly what Australia and I guess most other GSM based countries went through about 2-3 years ago. Users started realising that contracts weren't such a great idea and people like Vodafone (especially vodafone) started encouraging pre-paid plans. This lead to people buying phones outright, which meant more retailers, more choice, better phones.
Its the same with number portability and SMS, the USA is just 2-3 years behind the rest of the world in terms of mobile phone usage.
Take a trip to Italy, users there have at least 2 sim cards/providers in use CONSTANTLY - either two phones, or just constant swapping of sim cards. The providers (like Vodafone once again) get used to it and cater for it - for example, in Italy, if you ring someone and their phone is unavailable (ie they have a different sim card in) you can simply get the system to SMS you when they are back online. Its simple, but is convenient for users and encourages more calls (good for operators).
Actually, with the solution that AT+T has chosen, there is barely any lag between changing channels. The Microsoft TV solution (see brochure has a concept called "Instant Channel Change". I can't tell you how it works, but I can tell you i've seen it, used it and it does work, and its pretty damn fast.
What's more, unlike the useful free accounts such as gmail and yahoo that often put suspect mail into a spam box, I have no access or knowledge of what the spam filter is destroying - so emails aren't received, customers get cranky and information is lost, time is wasted. I'm sure there must be others who feel the pain of spam filters both at work and home.
Last time I checked, iiNet in Australia only has ADSL2 enabled (not ADSL2+) which is why the max for iiNet is 12Mbit down. Although, ADSL2 has some reach-extend variants that can be enabled to help those further from the exchange.
The big issue is the provider's IP and aggregation network. Around the world for DSL internet services, these only provide 30-50Kbit/s average per user. A LONG way from the 20 or so Mbit being offered on the access portion of the network (from your exchange to your house). This is why large scale streaming video deployments on these networks (ones with 10Mbit+ to the house) are non existant.
The back haul networks are expensive, hence the pissy little bandwidths.
Yes, Xvid and Divx are MPEG4 standards,
but just to make things confusing, they are only the 'start' of MPEG4 (MPEG4 encompasses heaps of different things, including meta data specs, etc).
H.264 is MPEG4 Advanced Codec (MPEG4 part 10) and uses basically every trick in the book to give you FANTASTIC looking video in low bit rates.
Although, H.264 isnt widely available yet, WMV9 is, and hence has a jump start.
Apple's Tiger OS has H.264 in it and you can now get a preview (if ur a 'select' member of the developer program). So do your best to find some H.264 samples, and you will be truly amazed at how much better it is than divx/xvid.
The biggest difference i find between remote desktop and VNC (i use Real) is that remote desktop actually starts a seperate login session, different to the one actually visible on the monitor. It tends to be more stable and have more accurate video, HOWEVER if you want to control what is actually on the monitor in the current windows session, VNC is the answer. I use it to drive presentations (video and powerpoint) on a PC connected to a projector, from the back of the presentation room. Very handy - also good if you want to show someone how to fix something on their PC.
In Australia, our biggest selling car, the Holden Commodore (General Motors) is already fitted with a simple form of black box that is able to tell accident investigators the speed travelled and throttle/brake use for the past few seconds before impact. The information has been used in at least 1 court case I know of since it has been around.
Well trying BT with Nokia handsets (and windows for that matter) no wonder you had problems. Nokia has some of the worst BT implementation I have ever seen - they just havent got it right yet, not by a long shot.
Most of their phones only seem to support the headset profile to start with. So no file transfers or syncs to other standard software/devices/phones.
Multicast is very uncommonly supported in the Internet/ISP world at the moment, mainly because most ISPs would not see a need for it. However, as video on broadband grows and gets serious, multicast is the only efficient and cost effective way of delivering it to many people. So once the isp's start to realise this and find a use for it (ie broadcasting their own video content and charging for it) will we see it in common place. Of course all the intermediate routers in the internet must be allowed to either tunnel or replicate the traffic (DVMRP is probably the most common multicast routing protocol). Also, IGMP which is the protocol used for requesting multicast streams, although in its 3rd iteration, is far from secure or reliable - and the bigger problem is, most network equipment, especially in the access leg of broadband (ie: DSL) only supports version 2 of IGMP, and although compatability is kinda built in - in practice its difficult to get workingi across all platforms, all modems, etc reliably.
Trust me, its hard, its part of my job.
Well it would mean maybe one day once all imperial had dissapeared, we would only have ONE set of socket wrenches...
and plus all the crocodiles would sound shorter, as they would only be 2 metres instead of 6 feet!
I worked with HP/Compaq stuff for a while, and in this case, if you just use the win XP "system" cd without the recovery cd, it works but you end up with practically no drivers for the system (like display, sound, etc) and plus they somehow made it so that that XP cd wont work in a non HP machine either, so its not really a REAL win XP cd... quasi xp cd.
It also looks like the tram could play a role in the Universal Studios back lot tour, smashing through fake walls and stuff as the blurb says... a million and one uses :)
but with long range bluetooth, it would still work (except may need new power source... mini nuclear fusion?)
This may sound silly, but how cool would it be to have some kind of wireless cabling system for connection between all pc devices (like bluetooth) i know its totaly inpracticle, but u could have one of those cool induction charging matts with a motherboard, hard drive, cdrom, etc just sitting on it with no wires! very trippy 8-)
Well from my perspective (Australia) GSM is king, sure we have CDMA too (the *new* analogue) but gsm has been around about 4 times longer, so therefore has the largest install base of mobiles and towers, and plus with 1800 micro cells in the city, GSM offers the best overall coverage pretty much anywhere you would want to go, including europe, asia and even the US (where i understand with a triband phone (incl 1900Mhz) you can call from pretty much any city u would like to go in the US)
:)
These days if your worried about reception you could always grab one of those LEO satellite phones that can also connect to GSM, ericsson makes those too i believe.
But yes GSM is king, and btw, it USES TDMA
You'll find that with any circuit board dropped in water, although it may work for a little while, it will still become liquid ingressed and the corrosion will continue to seep across the board leading to its eventual and terminal demise, but somehow (from experience repairing Fuji digi cams) companies will replace or repair the item under warranty if you winge enough (it fell into the water of its own accord! i promise!)