I believe this already exists for cable systems w/o IP Multicast - It's called switched digital video.
That said, if they implemented multicast out to and through the backbone, it could save a LOT of upstream bandwidth from user P2P apps.
Imagine if all subscribers to a torrent could receive multicast from the seeder, as opposed to now where the seeder gives peers content and they forward it on. Most P2P is effectively "ghetto multicast", with lack of backbone participation severely reducing efficiency.
I find it hard to believe a new frequency would interfere with one of the existing ones.
It makes a lot more sense that a software bug would degrade existing L1/L2 signals, or additional codes being broadcast on the L1/L2 frequencies would impact legacy signals on those frequencies.
Probably some idiot journalist translated "satellite that adds L5 isn't performing as well on L1 and L2" to "L5 is causing problems on L1 and L2".
The linked Wikipedia page for the article summary has no one named Horton as an Orwell Prize recipient (or even anyone who has made the shortlist) in any year, let alone 2008 or 2009.
I know someone who just transferred over to the Orion project because the defense-related project she was on (along with a number of defense projects at the same site) was cut leading to layoffs at that facility, while the facility out west that is doing Orion work is apparently desperate to hire people.
Typically forensic investigations (i.e. admissible evidence) are carried out using special hardware that prevents any possibility of writing to the media under investigation. This is to avoid any challenges that there's a possibility that the person who "found" the evidence put it there.
If evidence was "found" by Circuit City techs, there is no way to prove that they themselves did not put the evidence there.
T-Mo is using a different frequency band (1700 MHz) for 3G than AT&T does.
Very few phones available in the US support the 1700 MHz band, as I believe Japan and Korea are the only other countries to use 1700 MHz UMTS. Nearly everyone else outside of the US operates UMTS in the 2100 MHz band.
Yup, although if I recall correctly, AT&T actually allows discounted upgrades quite a while before contract expiration. I think I became eligible for a new phone after only a year or so.
I just checked my account - I am definately eligible for an upgrade now, 4 months short of the 2-year mark, and I'm 90% certain I've been eligible for a while.
iPhone users - QQ more, this is standard policy with every cell phone carrier in the United States for ANY phone, and in fact AT&T's upgrade policy is MUCH better than Verizon's (once a year or so as opposed to once every two).
CBS provides 720p but not Hulu, using the same technology (H.264 in an Adobe FLV container over RTMP).
It happens that CBS videos can also be ripped with rtmpdump, allowing performance of different players with the same video to be compared.
As a basis of comparison, the 720p CBS streams play smoothly on an Athlon XP 2800+ with mplayer, while 480p Hulu streams using the same codec and streaming format with Adobe's flash player do not.
Similarly, prior to Hulu making rtmpdump impossible to use by moving to RTMPE, Hulu video played fine with plenty of CPU margin if mplayer were used on the same machine.
So my issue is that a setup capable of 720p using the same codec and a decent player can't even do 480p with theirs. Hell, even their "low res" 360p video rarely plays smoothly.
My biggest frustration with Hulu today is their use of horrendously inefficient and technically inferior player implementations.
Adobe Flash Player is a resource hog - I've had issues with 720p video playing smoothly even on a Core 2 Quad with a GeForce 9800GT under Linux.
The same video plays smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ with a GeForce 7800GS if I use rtmpdump on a CBS high def stream and then play it back with mplayer. (Not an available option for Hulu.)
If they used a player that were: 1) As cross-platform as the existing solution (MacOS, Linux, Windows - this kills Silverlight for which Linux support typically lags at least one full version behind on) 2) Played back 720p video smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ and 480p video smoothly on my Asus Eee 1000HE.
I would consider a subscription if reasonably priced and ads were removed. I would NOT consider pay-per-view.
I think GM, Chrysler, and Ford should be sued by these same people for colluding to discontinue 1960s-era muscle cars. This has driven the price of such units up significantly due to continuing demand and stopped production.
While Microsoft obviously engages in a lot of monopolistic practices and I strongly dislike them for this, Russia's reasoning seems rather flawed.
While yes, it sucks that Windows XP is being EOLed for a lot of people because Vista is worse than XP for many users (IMO anyone with less RAM than the 32-bit addressing limit because if there's anything modern that sucks more than Vista, it's 64-bit XP), products getting EOLed is a fact of life. I can't see any reason why EOLing a product would be monopolistic.
Hell, if anything, it would be just the opposite - EOLing a popular product in favor of a less popular product is going to drive people towards the competition.
Depending on how the daisy-chaining is done, it could be feasible to "break" the daisy-chaining and run everything to a patch panel.
If you want to resell the house to a "normal" user, just reconnect everything to the same line at the PP. Then note that "hey, if you want to do multiple lines or a PBX, this house has a sweet patch panel here."
Admittedly at the beginning of the school year it's difficult, but usually a regular route driver learns what kids are supposed to be on their bus.
Similarly, a kid SHOULD know if they're on the correct route, BUT the OP claims this problem happened after only 2-3 days - not enough time for a little kid to learn the "proper" route and know when something is wrong.
So at least in theory the chances of this problem reoccurring should go WAY down as the school year progresses.
The problem is substitute drivers. Often they're incompetent and don't know the route, and at least in my experience back in high school, they oddly seemed to rarely know much English (whereas the regular drivers were all native English speakers - why it is I have no clue, or maybe it's just the memories of one particular non-English-speaking substitute driver sticking in my mind in particular.)
At one point my bus route had a substitute driver named Aziz for a few days (yes, over fifteen years later and I STILL remember the guy's name). He would frequently make wrong turns and miss stops. At one point he blew right by my street without stopping - the bus was supposed to turn up the street! He completely ignored all the students' requests to stop and start following the correct route (we weren't the only ones whose stop he screwed up on). Eventually with the bus getting farther and farther from our houses, we got off before things got worse. We wound up walking with backpacks full of books over a mile back to our homes.
This was well before cell phones were common and the area we were dropped off in was sparsely populated, so calling home was not an option.
For the original poster - even a cell phone so the child can call home may be enough. I don't know the details, but there are special cell phones for child safety that are preprogrammed with only a small handful of numbers. This allows a child to call home without a risk of them racking up lots of airtime charges on the phone.
Businesses often stay about one version behind on Microsoft products, or in some cases about a half cycle behind. They wait for a given MS product to get service packed out the wazoo before deploying it.
For example, my employer is just starting to roll out Office 2007 very slowly, and based on my experiences and many other reports, this is typical at most businesses.
Similarly, they are just rolling out IE7 now, when IE8 just came out.
So it's not surprising that IE6 still has a major deployment base considering that IE8 just came out and that many companies stay about one revision behind.
Nope. Actually, until recently, LEDs were about on par with halogen incandescent bulbs. (Not standard incandescents though).
LEDs have improved 2-3x in efficiency in the past 4-5 years allowing them to pass halogens in efficiency, but still probably not on par with CFLs.
LEDs dominated in the flashlight market because of two reasons: 1) Halogen bulb efficiency and durability increases with bulb size. Flashlight-sized bulbs were far less efficient and had typical lifetimes well below 100 hours, compared to full size halogen bulbs in the hundreds of watts range 2) LEDs dim much more gracefully in battery powered devices. An LED at 1% of its power still gives usable light, while an incandescent at 1% power may as well be turned off. Even at 50% power an incandescent shifts color significantly to the red, reducing visible light efficiency by massive amounts.
It says nowhere in the article that you can't disable it, just that you can't uninstall it.
In fact, the screenshot in the article shows an active disable button, but not an active uninstall button.
In a previous post, someone said that this is due to admin privileges issues. Most extensions are installed by a user and reside in a user-accessible directory. Firefox allows for system-wide installation of extensions by pointing to them with a registry entry. System-wide-installed extensions fundamentally can't be uninstalled directly by a user without some sort of privilege escalation, which Firefox doesn't support. MS didn't explicitly disable uninstallation, it's just a side effect of being a system-wide installation.
"They plan to make the entire protocol and the majority of their implementations open source so that anybody can install their own wave servers." - They say this at the very beginning, even before they start demoing the product.
So far I've only seen the first 15 minutes (had to go to work)
My previous approach was basically the same as MythVodka except more manual. Both depended on rtmpdump IIRC.
rtmpdump came with a get_hulu Perl script that worked until they moved to RTMPE.
If I rtmpdumped a stream and played it on my old machine (Athlon XP 2800+), it would play fine. Hulu would be choppy as hell.
The same machine can also playback rtmpdumped 720p streams from CBS smoothly, while standard def 480p streams from CBS effectively slideshow when using Flash Player.
They use streaming H264 in an Adobe FLV container, streamed using Adobe's proprietary RTMPE (RTMP Encrypted) protocol.
While RTMP is pretty well documented and RTMP dumpers/rippers exist, RTMPE is a whole other ballgame.
In addition, Hulu does some funky stuff with their flash app to obfuscate the actual RTMPE stream URL.
In short, without either Hulu's official client or Adobe Flash Player and Hulu's site, you're not going to be watching Hulu video. It may be h264 video, but it is streamed using a proprietary streaming protocol.
In short - Adobe shit IS required, and is notorious for having far higher system requirements than the same video played back with a player that doesn't suck. (i.e. it really IS shit) For example, Hulu video won't play smoothly on my living room desktop, while streams ripped prior to them moving from RTMP to RTMPE playback smoothly with less than 50% CPU usage in MPlayer.
1) Many power supply designs don't like it when the power demand is "unbalanced" - Pulling from only one rail and leaving the others unloaded can do some WEIRD things. Higher end power supplies have fully independent rails, but many have regulation on a given rail being dependent on other rails having a reasonable load.
2) Actually, the more current you're drawing, the smaller the inductor needs to be in order to have current flowing through it at all times (Counterintuitive but true) - This is why a power supply that is too lightly loaded will fall out of regulation. Of course, the switching transistors need to be bigger (main cost driver in power supplies) and the filter capacitors need to be bigger (second big cost driver and often #1 reliability driver).
A very good gaming system (Core 2 Duo, 9800GT) can be built for $500. An excellent system (Core 2 Quad, GTS 250) can be built for $600.
You'll probably spend $100-200 at least trying to get an existing system "up to snuff" for trying to do what the article poster wants to do, and the experience from that setup will be far less satisfying/more frustrating than just buying another system.
Your nice long post about how great ZigBee is left out a critical flaw with ZigBee - Cost. The per-node costs of every RF-based home automation system I've seen has been ridiculously high.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no Blogs category in the linked page. NightJack does not appear anywhere on the linked page, as of 1:07 PM Eastern on June 18, 2009.
I believe this already exists for cable systems w/o IP Multicast - It's called switched digital video.
That said, if they implemented multicast out to and through the backbone, it could save a LOT of upstream bandwidth from user P2P apps.
Imagine if all subscribers to a torrent could receive multicast from the seeder, as opposed to now where the seeder gives peers content and they forward it on. Most P2P is effectively "ghetto multicast", with lack of backbone participation severely reducing efficiency.
I find it hard to believe a new frequency would interfere with one of the existing ones.
It makes a lot more sense that a software bug would degrade existing L1/L2 signals, or additional codes being broadcast on the L1/L2 frequencies would impact legacy signals on those frequencies.
Probably some idiot journalist translated "satellite that adds L5 isn't performing as well on L1 and L2" to "L5 is causing problems on L1 and L2".
The linked Wikipedia page for the article summary has no one named Horton as an Orwell Prize recipient (or even anyone who has made the shortlist) in any year, let alone 2008 or 2009.
Orion, anyone?
I know someone who just transferred over to the Orion project because the defense-related project she was on (along with a number of defense projects at the same site) was cut leading to layoffs at that facility, while the facility out west that is doing Orion work is apparently desperate to hire people.
One thing I haven't seen discussed here.
Typically forensic investigations (i.e. admissible evidence) are carried out using special hardware that prevents any possibility of writing to the media under investigation. This is to avoid any challenges that there's a possibility that the person who "found" the evidence put it there.
If evidence was "found" by Circuit City techs, there is no way to prove that they themselves did not put the evidence there.
T-Mo is using a different frequency band (1700 MHz) for 3G than AT&T does.
Very few phones available in the US support the 1700 MHz band, as I believe Japan and Korea are the only other countries to use 1700 MHz UMTS. Nearly everyone else outside of the US operates UMTS in the 2100 MHz band.
Yup, although if I recall correctly, AT&T actually allows discounted upgrades quite a while before contract expiration. I think I became eligible for a new phone after only a year or so.
I just checked my account - I am definately eligible for an upgrade now, 4 months short of the 2-year mark, and I'm 90% certain I've been eligible for a while.
iPhone users - QQ more, this is standard policy with every cell phone carrier in the United States for ANY phone, and in fact AT&T's upgrade policy is MUCH better than Verizon's (once a year or so as opposed to once every two).
CBS provides 720p but not Hulu, using the same technology (H.264 in an Adobe FLV container over RTMP).
It happens that CBS videos can also be ripped with rtmpdump, allowing performance of different players with the same video to be compared.
As a basis of comparison, the 720p CBS streams play smoothly on an Athlon XP 2800+ with mplayer, while 480p Hulu streams using the same codec and streaming format with Adobe's flash player do not.
Similarly, prior to Hulu making rtmpdump impossible to use by moving to RTMPE, Hulu video played fine with plenty of CPU margin if mplayer were used on the same machine.
So my issue is that a setup capable of 720p using the same codec and a decent player can't even do 480p with theirs. Hell, even their "low res" 360p video rarely plays smoothly.
My biggest frustration with Hulu today is their use of horrendously inefficient and technically inferior player implementations.
Adobe Flash Player is a resource hog - I've had issues with 720p video playing smoothly even on a Core 2 Quad with a GeForce 9800GT under Linux.
The same video plays smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ with a GeForce 7800GS if I use rtmpdump on a CBS high def stream and then play it back with mplayer. (Not an available option for Hulu.)
If they used a player that were:
1) As cross-platform as the existing solution (MacOS, Linux, Windows - this kills Silverlight for which Linux support typically lags at least one full version behind on)
2) Played back 720p video smoothly on my old Athlon XP 2800+ and 480p video smoothly on my Asus Eee 1000HE.
I would consider a subscription if reasonably priced and ads were removed. I would NOT consider pay-per-view.
I think GM, Chrysler, and Ford should be sued by these same people for colluding to discontinue 1960s-era muscle cars. This has driven the price of such units up significantly due to continuing demand and stopped production.
While Microsoft obviously engages in a lot of monopolistic practices and I strongly dislike them for this, Russia's reasoning seems rather flawed.
While yes, it sucks that Windows XP is being EOLed for a lot of people because Vista is worse than XP for many users (IMO anyone with less RAM than the 32-bit addressing limit because if there's anything modern that sucks more than Vista, it's 64-bit XP), products getting EOLed is a fact of life. I can't see any reason why EOLing a product would be monopolistic.
Hell, if anything, it would be just the opposite - EOLing a popular product in favor of a less popular product is going to drive people towards the competition.
Depending on how the daisy-chaining is done, it could be feasible to "break" the daisy-chaining and run everything to a patch panel.
If you want to resell the house to a "normal" user, just reconnect everything to the same line at the PP. Then note that "hey, if you want to do multiple lines or a PBX, this house has a sweet patch panel here."
This assumes a competent bus driver.
Admittedly at the beginning of the school year it's difficult, but usually a regular route driver learns what kids are supposed to be on their bus.
Similarly, a kid SHOULD know if they're on the correct route, BUT the OP claims this problem happened after only 2-3 days - not enough time for a little kid to learn the "proper" route and know when something is wrong.
So at least in theory the chances of this problem reoccurring should go WAY down as the school year progresses.
The problem is substitute drivers. Often they're incompetent and don't know the route, and at least in my experience back in high school, they oddly seemed to rarely know much English (whereas the regular drivers were all native English speakers - why it is I have no clue, or maybe it's just the memories of one particular non-English-speaking substitute driver sticking in my mind in particular.)
At one point my bus route had a substitute driver named Aziz for a few days (yes, over fifteen years later and I STILL remember the guy's name). He would frequently make wrong turns and miss stops. At one point he blew right by my street without stopping - the bus was supposed to turn up the street! He completely ignored all the students' requests to stop and start following the correct route (we weren't the only ones whose stop he screwed up on). Eventually with the bus getting farther and farther from our houses, we got off before things got worse. We wound up walking with backpacks full of books over a mile back to our homes.
This was well before cell phones were common and the area we were dropped off in was sparsely populated, so calling home was not an option.
For the original poster - even a cell phone so the child can call home may be enough. I don't know the details, but there are special cell phones for child safety that are preprogrammed with only a small handful of numbers. This allows a child to call home without a risk of them racking up lots of airtime charges on the phone.
Businesses often stay about one version behind on Microsoft products, or in some cases about a half cycle behind. They wait for a given MS product to get service packed out the wazoo before deploying it.
For example, my employer is just starting to roll out Office 2007 very slowly, and based on my experiences and many other reports, this is typical at most businesses.
Similarly, they are just rolling out IE7 now, when IE8 just came out.
So it's not surprising that IE6 still has a major deployment base considering that IE8 just came out and that many companies stay about one revision behind.
Nope. Actually, until recently, LEDs were about on par with halogen incandescent bulbs. (Not standard incandescents though).
LEDs have improved 2-3x in efficiency in the past 4-5 years allowing them to pass halogens in efficiency, but still probably not on par with CFLs.
LEDs dominated in the flashlight market because of two reasons:
1) Halogen bulb efficiency and durability increases with bulb size. Flashlight-sized bulbs were far less efficient and had typical lifetimes well below 100 hours, compared to full size halogen bulbs in the hundreds of watts range
2) LEDs dim much more gracefully in battery powered devices. An LED at 1% of its power still gives usable light, while an incandescent at 1% power may as well be turned off. Even at 50% power an incandescent shifts color significantly to the red, reducing visible light efficiency by massive amounts.
It says nowhere in the article that you can't disable it, just that you can't uninstall it.
In fact, the screenshot in the article shows an active disable button, but not an active uninstall button.
In a previous post, someone said that this is due to admin privileges issues. Most extensions are installed by a user and reside in a user-accessible directory. Firefox allows for system-wide installation of extensions by pointing to them with a registry entry. System-wide-installed extensions fundamentally can't be uninstalled directly by a user without some sort of privilege escalation, which Firefox doesn't support. MS didn't explicitly disable uninstallation, it's just a side effect of being a system-wide installation.
What's so special at the end?
"They plan to make the entire protocol and the majority of their implementations open source so that anybody can install their own wave servers." - They say this at the very beginning, even before they start demoing the product.
So far I've only seen the first 15 minutes (had to go to work)
My previous approach was basically the same as MythVodka except more manual. Both depended on rtmpdump IIRC.
rtmpdump came with a get_hulu Perl script that worked until they moved to RTMPE.
If I rtmpdumped a stream and played it on my old machine (Athlon XP 2800+), it would play fine. Hulu would be choppy as hell.
The same machine can also playback rtmpdumped 720p streams from CBS smoothly, while standard def 480p streams from CBS effectively slideshow when using Flash Player.
One three letter acronym: DRM
They use streaming H264 in an Adobe FLV container, streamed using Adobe's proprietary RTMPE (RTMP Encrypted) protocol.
While RTMP is pretty well documented and RTMP dumpers/rippers exist, RTMPE is a whole other ballgame.
In addition, Hulu does some funky stuff with their flash app to obfuscate the actual RTMPE stream URL.
In short, without either Hulu's official client or Adobe Flash Player and Hulu's site, you're not going to be watching Hulu video. It may be h264 video, but it is streamed using a proprietary streaming protocol.
In short - Adobe shit IS required, and is notorious for having far higher system requirements than the same video played back with a player that doesn't suck. (i.e. it really IS shit) For example, Hulu video won't play smoothly on my living room desktop, while streams ripped prior to them moving from RTMP to RTMPE playback smoothly with less than 50% CPU usage in MPlayer.
AT&T has not historically done content filtering of any sort for wireless customers.
I have never had any restriction on the ability to use IM, SSH, or other protocols when using my AT&T phone.
I haven't tried VOIP because the latency of the cellular data connection is simply too high for VOIP.
1) Many power supply designs don't like it when the power demand is "unbalanced" - Pulling from only one rail and leaving the others unloaded can do some WEIRD things. Higher end power supplies have fully independent rails, but many have regulation on a given rail being dependent on other rails having a reasonable load.
2) Actually, the more current you're drawing, the smaller the inductor needs to be in order to have current flowing through it at all times (Counterintuitive but true) - This is why a power supply that is too lightly loaded will fall out of regulation. Of course, the switching transistors need to be bigger (main cost driver in power supplies) and the filter capacitors need to be bigger (second big cost driver and often #1 reliability driver).
Or go to Newegg and build up a new system.
A very good gaming system (Core 2 Duo, 9800GT) can be built for $500. An excellent system (Core 2 Quad, GTS 250) can be built for $600.
You'll probably spend $100-200 at least trying to get an existing system "up to snuff" for trying to do what the article poster wants to do, and the experience from that setup will be far less satisfying/more frustrating than just buying another system.
Your nice long post about how great ZigBee is left out a critical flaw with ZigBee - Cost. The per-node costs of every RF-based home automation system I've seen has been ridiculously high.