I experimented with UDF a couple of years ago. As always, Windows is the problem. No matter what I did, Windows did not see the thumbdrive as a drive letter. And Google didn't show up any useful pages either.
The summary is presumably referring to Larry Niven's A gift from Earth. It details a human colony that has become split into two - the Crew (descendants of the crew that flew the original ship), who rule over the Colonists. They have become dependant on organ transplants to the point that all crimes are punished by death - at which point their organs are harvested. Even worse, this is only done to the Colonists and the organs are only received by the Crew.
Anyway, it's an interesting book. The main protagonist finds he has a unique psychic ability - he can make people completely uninterested in himself.
GSM has been around only since the early 90s (less than 2 decades).
OK, I stand corrected.
Saying UMTS is "basically GMTS with a new air interface" is completely misleading. GSM is an FDMA / TDMA hybrid... UMTS is most commonly CDMA...
Uh, that's what I meant when I said "air interface". Yes, the modulation/multiplexing techniques are completely different. But the protocol(s) used between the tower and phone, and between towers, are (from what I understand) essentially the same. And that's what this OpenBSC project is handling.
Multi-mode phones can support both standards only because the RF frequencies are sufficiently close and they have completely separate processing algorithms for each built-in, not because there's a wealth of technical similarities between the two standards.
No, they support both standards (with two modems) because they both use the same underlying protocols. To put it in Internet terms, you're arguing that my desktop using wired Ethernet is using completely different Internet protocols than your laptop using Wi-Fi. We're simply talking about different layers.
Oh dear, someone clearly has a new 3G phone and thinks everyone should dump that old stuff. Because it's old. Nobody likes old technology! It has to be new and flash!
I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades. Apart from video calls and high-speed internet access, GSM does everything that 3G does. For many people, voice calls and text messaging is still what they use a mobile phone for. Mobile phone use is taking off in poorer parts of the world because it's cheaper and simpler to set up towers that can serve hundreds (thousands?) of people across a large area than run telephone lines to every single house ("leapfrogging"). This software (OpenBSC) could certainly be of use in these parts of the world.
UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.
So this development effort will not be for naught in the 3G world. They'll just have to find some new hardware that does UMTS and will continue working.
See this blog - Splitting CUE/FLAC Files using cuetools and shntool (both in Debian/Ubuntu). Annoyingly the filenames are in the form 'split-tracknn.flac', so you'll still have to rename them. I have a Perl script that pulls out the FLAC metadata (written by the cuetag program) and renames them to 'nn-track name.flac'.
The iTunes extentions to the aac format allow album art, all the information from liner notes, lyrics (although not synchronized lyrics AFAIK), and more to be embeded in a song.
No, actually those features are handled by the (standard) MPEG-4 container format. That's something that the "MP3" format never had. MP3 is just an MPEG-1 audio elemental stream, never really intended to be used on its own. That's why the hack that is ID3 had to be invented.
I mean I would not mind a file format that allowed album artwork, lyrics, and liner notes to be stored in a standardized way along with all the songs of a single album, as long as individual songs can still be extracted.
FLAC has been doing this for years - rip an entire album as one long track and embed the CUE sheet. It allows you to write an audio CD that is an exact copy (including all the right gaps), or to break it up into individual tracks. The artist/album/genre/etc info is in a Vorbis comment block, and any album cover art can be embedded as well. Tada! No need to reinvent the wheel.
Except it has no DRM and is widely supported by those smelly hippie Linux users and their open sores software! So of course they must reinvent the wheel...
Imagine it, we build a space port in geosynchronous orbit. It would decrease the necessity to have massive quantities of fuel expended for vehicles to reach orbital velocity since you'd already be at speed at launch time.
Um, geosynchronous orbit (GEO) is a long way out - 36 000 km. It's a very high orbit compared to most other things we put into orbit. When a GEO satellite is launched, the rocket only launches it into a "geosynchronous transfer orbit" (GTO); a large booster then gives it enough delta-V to get up into GEO. Your idea would certainly not decrease the need for fuel.
I tried PanF+ a few years ago when I was still a film noob. I used it entirely indoors with a flash. I got a few usable photos, but most were too dark. I've read since that it's rather contrasty and unlike most B&W films, doesn't handle overexposure well. I might give it another try some time, but not before the cheaper Adox/Efke or maybe Lucky.
Except the Electro 35 only operates in aperture priority auto-exposure mode (well, plus flash and bulb). And the light sensor is on the camera body, not affected by a filter. But I suppose I could compensate by adjusting the film speed dial. I even have a spot light meter, so I could check to see exactly how much light the filter blocks. Thanks for the suggestion.
Old Velvia was 50ASA which was insanely slow, and hard to shoot with. Wonderful with tripod but handheld was hard. I actually found it a bit over saturated, though that's a matter of opinion.
ISO 50 isn't so slow. Once upon a time that would have been considered medium speed. Kodachrome was once offered at ISO 25, and I've heard of some older films going down to ISO 8. Now THAT's slow! I've used Velvia handheld lots of times, but always outdoors during the day. With Velvia's high contrast and strong reciprocity failure, you don't really want to use it in low light anyway. It involves either careful metering and looking up a correction table, or luck (or bracketing).
And slow film has its uses. I recently bought a Yashica Electro 35 GSN, which has a nice 1:1.7 45 mm lens. I want to use the lens wide open to get really shallow depth of field - an effect I've come to really like. But to achieve that during the day, I'm going to need some slow film; likely ISO 50 or 25. Probably some Adox/Efke or Rollei.
Just to nitpick, but the video codec is standardised by both MPEG and ITU. The "h.264" (lowercase 'h' followed by a period) name that everyone has latched onto is used by the ITU. In the MPEG world, it is known as MPEG-4 AVC (advanced video codec) or formally, MPEG-4 Part 10.
How about Australia? Well, Telstra Bigpond has 21Mbps HSPA+ with probably very good coverage (can't find a link), Vodafone Australia has 3.6Mbps HSDPA with (soon to be) good coverage and Optus has a 3G/UMTS network with spotty coverage.
The United States has over fifteen times the population of Australia, yet the U.S. has long been behind when it comes to mobile phone technology. Is it the telco monopolies? Is there low demand? It's weird.
GNU software also has licences that gives you permission to use the software based on a given set of premises.
Really now? And which license is that? The GNU GPL/LGPL are source code licenses, not end-user licenses. Clause 0 of the GPL v2 states "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted".
I want a plugin for firefox that detects "hmm, this is flash... Oh, this is flash video! Remove flash, download *.flv in the background, insert embedded mplayer."
Then I'd dump flash faster than you can count to e^{i \pi} + 1.
I'd download that extension in a flash (no pun intended). I'm still using a somewhat old computer as my primary workstation (Athlon XP 2600+). It can play 720p HD content fine with Mplayer. But Flash still has trouble playing a measly 320x240 video without occasional skips and jumps. Why is it so difficult for Flash to play video? Is it just the Linux plugin?
The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel â" bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not â" and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines.
From what I understand, the problem with SMS's sent on the GSM standard is that it is in the control channel - as the anonymous submitter stated. But there's only one control channel for each cell versus many data (voice, etc) channels, and it has a lot less bandwidth than even one data channel. It was only ever meant to handle connecting calls, phones moving from one cell to another, etc. Administrative stuff. SMS was never meant as a proper way to move lots of messages. But it's now a major form of communication and it's using a channel (the control channel) that is very limited.
When "text usage goes up", I'm guessing the only thing the carriers can do is to install more cells in order to get more control channels. But surely there's a limit to how many cells can co-exist in a given area. But everyone's moving to various "3G" networks and AFAIK they have proper means to send messages, photos, videos, etc. The anonymous submitter is still an idiot though.
We just replaced a bunch of the fucktards with a new batch of fucktards too. Maybe you guys should give that a try.
We did, last year. Our previous bunch of fucktards had been in power for eleven years. They were a royal bunch of fucktards but stuff like this isn't making the new bunch of fucktards look much better.
A GPS bomb trigger for a fraction of the price of an iPhone? priceless
Note, I'm not affiliated with SparkFun in any way. I'm also not condoning terrorist action, just pointing out how easy it is nowadays with cheap and easy access to the necessary technology.
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I experimented with UDF a couple of years ago. As always, Windows is the problem. No matter what I did, Windows did not see the thumbdrive as a drive letter. And Google didn't show up any useful pages either.
It would be nice if the default was to pick a random arbitrary and large UID so the chance of UID clashes would be remote.
You know what would be great? If someone made a daemon for mapping UID's between machines. That'd be fantastic, but I'm sure no one else has thought of such a thing.
The summary is presumably referring to Larry Niven's A gift from Earth . It details a human colony that has become split into two - the Crew (descendants of the crew that flew the original ship), who rule over the Colonists. They have become dependant on organ transplants to the point that all crimes are punished by death - at which point their organs are harvested. Even worse, this is only done to the Colonists and the organs are only received by the Crew.
Anyway, it's an interesting book. The main protagonist finds he has a unique psychic ability - he can make people completely uninterested in himself.
GSM has been around only since the early 90s (less than 2 decades).
OK, I stand corrected.
Saying UMTS is "basically GMTS with a new air interface" is completely misleading. GSM is an FDMA / TDMA hybrid... UMTS is most commonly CDMA...
Uh, that's what I meant when I said "air interface". Yes, the modulation/multiplexing techniques are completely different. But the protocol(s) used between the tower and phone, and between towers, are (from what I understand) essentially the same. And that's what this OpenBSC project is handling.
Multi-mode phones can support both standards only because the RF frequencies are sufficiently close and they have completely separate processing algorithms for each built-in, not because there's a wealth of technical similarities between the two standards.
No, they support both standards (with two modems) because they both use the same underlying protocols. To put it in Internet terms, you're arguing that my desktop using wired Ethernet is using completely different Internet protocols than your laptop using Wi-Fi. We're simply talking about different layers.
Oh dear, someone clearly has a new 3G phone and thinks everyone should dump that old stuff. Because it's old. Nobody likes old technology! It has to be new and flash!
I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades. Apart from video calls and high-speed internet access, GSM does everything that 3G does. For many people, voice calls and text messaging is still what they use a mobile phone for. Mobile phone use is taking off in poorer parts of the world because it's cheaper and simpler to set up towers that can serve hundreds (thousands?) of people across a large area than run telephone lines to every single house ("leapfrogging"). This software (OpenBSC) could certainly be of use in these parts of the world.
UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.
So this development effort will not be for naught in the 3G world. They'll just have to find some new hardware that does UMTS and will continue working.
Western Europe | 514 people/mi^2
United States | 86.5 people/mi^2
Australia: ~7.3 people/mi^2 (from Wikipedia)
Yet, we're about middle of the pack in those three spreadsheets. Face it, U.S. telcos are a huge rip off.
See this blog - Splitting CUE/FLAC Files using cuetools and shntool (both in Debian/Ubuntu). Annoyingly the filenames are in the form 'split-tracknn.flac', so you'll still have to rename them. I have a Perl script that pulls out the FLAC metadata (written by the cuetag program) and renames them to 'nn-track name.flac'.
The iTunes extentions to the aac format allow album art, all the information from liner notes, lyrics (although not synchronized lyrics AFAIK), and more to be embeded in a song.
No, actually those features are handled by the (standard) MPEG-4 container format. That's something that the "MP3" format never had. MP3 is just an MPEG-1 audio elemental stream, never really intended to be used on its own. That's why the hack that is ID3 had to be invented.
I mean I would not mind a file format that allowed album artwork, lyrics, and liner notes to be stored in a standardized way along with all the songs of a single album, as long as individual songs can still be extracted.
FLAC has been doing this for years - rip an entire album as one long track and embed the CUE sheet. It allows you to write an audio CD that is an exact copy (including all the right gaps), or to break it up into individual tracks. The artist/album/genre/etc info is in a Vorbis comment block, and any album cover art can be embedded as well. Tada! No need to reinvent the wheel.
Except it has no DRM and is widely supported by those smelly hippie Linux users and their open sores software! So of course they must reinvent the wheel...
You might be interested in Russia's planned Parom spacecraft.
Imagine it, we build a space port in geosynchronous orbit. It would decrease the necessity to have massive quantities of fuel expended for vehicles to reach orbital velocity since you'd already be at speed at launch time.
Um, geosynchronous orbit (GEO) is a long way out - 36 000 km. It's a very high orbit compared to most other things we put into orbit. When a GEO satellite is launched, the rocket only launches it into a "geosynchronous transfer orbit" (GTO); a large booster then gives it enough delta-V to get up into GEO. Your idea would certainly not decrease the need for fuel.
I tried PanF+ a few years ago when I was still a film noob. I used it entirely indoors with a flash. I got a few usable photos, but most were too dark. I've read since that it's rather contrasty and unlike most B&W films, doesn't handle overexposure well. I might give it another try some time, but not before the cheaper Adox/Efke or maybe Lucky.
Except the Electro 35 only operates in aperture priority auto-exposure mode (well, plus flash and bulb). And the light sensor is on the camera body, not affected by a filter. But I suppose I could compensate by adjusting the film speed dial. I even have a spot light meter, so I could check to see exactly how much light the filter blocks. Thanks for the suggestion.
ISO 50 isn't so slow. Once upon a time that would have been considered medium speed. Kodachrome was once offered at ISO 25, and I've heard of some older films going down to ISO 8. Now THAT's slow! I've used Velvia handheld lots of times, but always outdoors during the day. With Velvia's high contrast and strong reciprocity failure, you don't really want to use it in low light anyway. It involves either careful metering and looking up a correction table, or luck (or bracketing).
And slow film has its uses. I recently bought a Yashica Electro 35 GSN, which has a nice 1:1.7 45 mm lens. I want to use the lens wide open to get really shallow depth of field - an effect I've come to really like. But to achieve that during the day, I'm going to need some slow film; likely ISO 50 or 25. Probably some Adox/Efke or Rollei.
Just to nitpick, but the video codec is standardised by both MPEG and ITU. The "h.264" (lowercase 'h' followed by a period) name that everyone has latched onto is used by the ITU. In the MPEG world, it is known as MPEG-4 AVC (advanced video codec) or formally, MPEG-4 Part 10.
How about Australia? Well, Telstra Bigpond has 21Mbps HSPA+ with probably very good coverage (can't find a link), Vodafone Australia has 3.6Mbps HSDPA with (soon to be) good coverage and Optus has a 3G/UMTS network with spotty coverage.
The United States has over fifteen times the population of Australia, yet the U.S. has long been behind when it comes to mobile phone technology. Is it the telco monopolies? Is there low demand? It's weird.
What flavour is it?
not worthy of a place on the \. front page
Backslashdot?
Really now? And which license is that? The GNU GPL/LGPL are source code licenses, not end-user licenses. Clause 0 of the GPL v2 states "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted".
Oh, but you do - by buying your computer from Apple.
Don't have an Apple Mac? Then Apple hasn't given you permission to install OS X on it.
I want a plugin for firefox that detects "hmm, this is flash... Oh, this is flash video! Remove flash, download *.flv in the background, insert embedded mplayer."
Then I'd dump flash faster than you can count to e^{i \pi} + 1.
I'd download that extension in a flash (no pun intended). I'm still using a somewhat old computer as my primary workstation (Athlon XP 2600+). It can play 720p HD content fine with Mplayer. But Flash still has trouble playing a measly 320x240 video without occasional skips and jumps. Why is it so difficult for Flash to play video? Is it just the Linux plugin?
The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel â" bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not â" and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines.
From what I understand, the problem with SMS's sent on the GSM standard is that it is in the control channel - as the anonymous submitter stated. But there's only one control channel for each cell versus many data (voice, etc) channels, and it has a lot less bandwidth than even one data channel. It was only ever meant to handle connecting calls, phones moving from one cell to another, etc. Administrative stuff. SMS was never meant as a proper way to move lots of messages. But it's now a major form of communication and it's using a channel (the control channel) that is very limited.
When "text usage goes up", I'm guessing the only thing the carriers can do is to install more cells in order to get more control channels. But surely there's a limit to how many cells can co-exist in a given area. But everyone's moving to various "3G" networks and AFAIK they have proper means to send messages, photos, videos, etc. The anonymous submitter is still an idiot though.
We just replaced a bunch of the fucktards with a new batch of fucktards too. Maybe you guys should give that a try.
We did, last year. Our previous bunch of fucktards had been in power for eleven years. They were a royal bunch of fucktards but stuff like this isn't making the new bunch of fucktards look much better.
From now on I will describe myself as being from Australia (a small country near New Zealand).
That would be the "west island".
Note, I'm not affiliated with SparkFun in any way. I'm also not condoning terrorist action, just pointing out how easy it is nowadays with cheap and easy access to the necessary technology.