I went on a tour of the major cities (and some minor ones) back when they were awarded the Olympics. Massive slum-clearing and beautification projects were underway, partly for social reasons due to Olympic visitors, but the big reason was to increase the green space in Beijing. All of the highway bridges were installed with tree planters and trees were being grown in the outer suburbs and trucked in to the city in the hopes it would reduce pollution and alleviate the windy, dusty conditions that are, evidently, a normal part of Beijing life.
Beijing does not really have a smog problem because smog requires humidity. This region suffers from excessively dry and dusty air in almost every season. We felt it almost immediately when we deplaned for the Beijing leg of our trip. It is an unfortunate ecology event that Beijing is not only dry and dusty but it also suffers from regular sand-storm-like weather events, though they don't really refer to them as sand-storms in Beijing. Some of the popular culture regrets the capital was moved to dry, arid Beijing when they fell it should have remained in temperate Nanjing, the "south capital."
I had previously done research on this for a contract and the fact was the only modem that supported voice on POTS was discontinued some years ago. Probably the best solution you will be able to find that is supported, especially on Linux, is the Grandstream HandyTone HT-503 device.
The non-obvious secret to these devices is that there are two kinds of PSTN connection devices. The first is the simple dial-out-only devices called FXS. You don't want those because they are unable to accept incoming phone calls--they just hook to your telephone desk sets.
What you want is an FXO device, but be careful. Some devices only accept incoming calls and some only dial out. You want the one that does both, and one that has both FXS and FXO ports on it so you will only need one device for everything you want. The Grandstream HandyTone HT-503 device is that device. (This is the new version of the discontinued HandyTone 488.)
Hi, Skype is probably doing much more than just phone data.
A simple VoIP phone (or phone adapter), such as from Grandstream, has a setting that can set up the codecs to not transmit anything when there is silence. It's called "Silence Supression." The phone (or adapter) runs an algorithm that detects silence and transmits a packet that says "silence" and stops transmitting. When the silence is over it transmits another packet that wakes up the other end. While all this is happening a "comfort noise" is played to both party's handsets so it doesn't sound like the phone disconnected.
I don't know if Skype offers configuration of comfort noise and silence suppression because I do not use that service. Nearly all the real VoIP providers do, and for a few years I have been using Broadvoice using my own VoIP devices for around $5 per month.
They're being revisionist. It was originally "Hybrid Digital" and then they changed their mind about it because eventually, say in 20 years, stations will convert to all-digital format and no longer be "hybrid." Now they just say it's a nebulous, meaninglist string of two consonants to save face and help the public mistake HD for High Definition since everyone wants HD these days.
On the other hand, there is a local public broadcaster in our area (MHz Networks) that completely switched off their analog channel the moment they got their digital channel on the air. It has 5 subchannels on one channel and 4 subchannels on another, and none are High-Definition. And they don't say they're High Definition or HD; they just say "digital," just like the truth is.
That's right. XM's music channels range from 96 kbit/sec to 32 kbit/sec. HD Radio in hybrid mode offers a maximum of 150 kbit/sec, not including the subchannels and like I stated, the multicasting stations that use multiple subchannels will suffer in quality until full-digital (non-hybrid HD Radio) occurs which is not forseen until the very distant future.
Personally I don't like low-bitrate MP3. The new AOL Radio service uses files now instead of streaming and those files are 128 kbit/sec MP3 files which are decidedly low quality.
In any case I'm getting Mitch's HD Radio adapter as soon as I can find a controllable OEM radio that won't cost near $100.
Even with digital output you won't be keeping those HD Radio broadcasts for music listening purposes. I have XM and Sirius with optical outputs and the sound being broadcast by them has fairly poor fidelity. If you're used to that, then you probably won't notice, but comparing any of the broadcasted digital formats (even internet radio) to anything you can download from iTunes is going to disappoint you.
HD Radio compares favorably to XM Satellite Radio since they use very similar audio codecs, but even then you're not going to like it for music. If the station you want to record is multicasting, meaning that it has more than one "channel" on one frequency, you're going to be disappointed unless it's a talk program.
The bandwidth for music on the multicasting HD Radio stations is not worth the cost to bother with optical outputs. Line level input will be more than you could need.
Please visit www.rush2112.net for an adapter and controller for the Visteon HD Radio car unit and the one from Directed Electronics. It can be used with a number of satellite radio recorders like SatAmp to record broadcasts and timeshift. It also comes with a demo and development kit if you like that sort of thing.
If you choose a highly-encrypted codec, like G.729, it takes less time to transmit your voice data than it takes you to speak it, so when you're done speaking the other side is better than 1/4 second behind you, and it's just like an analog satellite voice connection--some would say better because the fidelity is so much greater due to the codec.
Data transmission is not the problem, and neither is latency. People who use satellite phones are already used to the extended pause when one party stops talking and the other starts talking.
However, transmitting the data is no worse than analog, and with the right codec, you won't be struggling for bandwidth.
Most of these posts concern the Fair Access Policy limits and latency but you are probably excessively familiar with it already. I'm discussing how to solve your problem with access.
The key phrase that catches my eye in your question is that you are in remote, Northern Canada. The beams you are able to receive are at such an oblique angle you should feel lucky to get any service. As you know the satellites are over the equator. The latitude at which you are located is likely so far north that the satellite signal has to travel through so many hundreds of miles of murky atmosphere before it has to travel another 22,500 miles to the satellite. You might consider yourself fortunate that it even works at all at such a high latitude.
Northern Russia has an even bigger problem and they solved it with highly-elliptical orbits, sometimes called "tundra" orbits, but that requires some expensive ground equipment to track the birds and it's not even 100% available. The Antarctic uses huge C-band dishes and they're not even available at all times of data due to even more atmosphere attenuating the signal.
While you do not specifically mention the provider or the satellite format you are probably using a Ku-band system like Starband or HughesNet. WildBlue, while actively marketing to Canada, has most of its spotbeams aimed at just north of the Canadian border and they're at really oblique angles at that. Since WildBlue uses Ka-band it's out of the question for these distances and will be unavailable when the weather is rainy.
To solve this problem you'll be looking at expensive, non-consumer solutions that work in the C-band. Though the signals were somewhat weaker in the past, the newer satellites serving up north have surprisingly powerful C-band beams and, being in the C-band, they aren't affected by raindrops like Ku-band and Ka-band are, so the low angle in your location wouldn't be such a huge problem.
The following outfits provide this kind of specialized internet service. I hope they are useful to you. For this kind of money, and the way C-band works, you can find dedicated transponder segments (and even entire transponders) so you will have a dedicated link.
Wow. Yahoo definitely does not have stale search offerings or second-rate search technology.
Just because you're not the flavor-of-the-month search engine doesn't mean your technology is stale or second rate.
The only thing I can agree with is the unmotivated workforce--but they are in no way a mediocre bunch.
YHOO survived the dot-com bust because they are a well-diversified and complete web service company. GOOG is striving to become that, but GOOG is flavor-of-the month because GOOG is the glamorous company that avoided the dot-com bust because they started later.
Come on, try to be objective when comparing YHOO and GOOG.
Good press does not necessarily mean better company.
Bad press does not necessarily mean worse company.
It's a shame so many of you feel this way without any sort of objective research.
You might call Microsoft the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy of the software industry. Use it until it outlasts its usefulness and then release it to the rest of the world for no charge.
Thankfully an alternative to XML. If you didn't think XML was among least efficient transport formats then you weren't really paying attention. Battery-conscious mobile devices do not really enjoy parsing XML DTD and then the XML file itself. It reminds me a little bit of AOL's SNAC message types.
We get something good for the industry from Google, after a rash of bad press, and is actually NOT a beta.
PDF makes sense for document signing, security, and damage detection. TIFF does not have any of this important security and data integrity protection by itself.
PDF also allows for the same compression on the scanned image that TIFF does, as well as much better compression methods available to it.
TIFF, while well-understood in the archival industry, has rather fledgling support in the free *NIX world--especially multi-page TIFF.
Finally, with PDF, you can preserve both the image and the OCR data all in the same file. That's impossible with TIFF.
This is because VIA's technology is encumbered by the patents and trade secrets of the companies they acquired.
S3, now owned by VIA, own several patents and trade secret IP in the video processors now known as VIA Unichrome. These are things like Savage, ProSavage, ViRGE, Vision, Aura, etc.
A similar situation exists with the sound hardware with trade secret IP owned by IC Ensemble, also acquired by VIA.
It's not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes this trade secret IP uses technology licensed from other companies. VIA does not have the right nor the ability to ethically release this information to the public.
It's the northbridge, I believe. I have several motherboards that use this configuration including some nForce boards. I think it's to make the leads as short as possible without too much of that wasteful zig-zagging that equalizes their lengths.
That's how some makers, like Dell, solved the problem of using AMD 64 processors on BTX boards (the BTX specification puts the processor too far away from the memory and moving the chipset at an angle leaves more room for memory leads since AMD puts the memory controller on the processor and Intel does not).
Slashdot Mirror
I went on a tour of the major cities (and some minor ones) back when they were awarded the Olympics. Massive slum-clearing and beautification projects were underway, partly for social reasons due to Olympic visitors, but the big reason was to increase the green space in Beijing. All of the highway bridges were installed with tree planters and trees were being grown in the outer suburbs and trucked in to the city in the hopes it would reduce pollution and alleviate the windy, dusty conditions that are, evidently, a normal part of Beijing life.
Beijing does not really have a smog problem because smog requires humidity. This region suffers from excessively dry and dusty air in almost every season. We felt it almost immediately when we deplaned for the Beijing leg of our trip. It is an unfortunate ecology event that Beijing is not only dry and dusty but it also suffers from regular sand-storm-like weather events, though they don't really refer to them as sand-storms in Beijing. Some of the popular culture regrets the capital was moved to dry, arid Beijing when they fell it should have remained in temperate Nanjing, the "south capital."
Kriston
I had previously done research on this for a contract and the fact was the only modem that supported voice on POTS was discontinued some years ago. Probably the best solution you will be able to find that is supported, especially on Linux, is the Grandstream HandyTone HT-503 device.
The non-obvious secret to these devices is that there are two kinds of PSTN connection devices. The first is the simple dial-out-only devices called FXS. You don't want those because they are unable to accept incoming phone calls--they just hook to your telephone desk sets.
What you want is an FXO device, but be careful. Some devices only accept incoming calls and some only dial out. You want the one that does both, and one that has both FXS and FXO ports on it so you will only need one device for everything you want. The Grandstream HandyTone HT-503 device is that device. (This is the new version of the discontinued HandyTone 488.)
The world does not need any more Ubuntu derivatives.
I like the move.
Kris
Yes, but APC (American Power Conversion) only did that after watching us reverse-engineer their data ports for 8 years.
Hi, Skype is probably doing much more than just phone data.
A simple VoIP phone (or phone adapter), such as from Grandstream, has a setting that can set up the codecs to not transmit anything when there is silence.
It's called "Silence Supression." The phone (or adapter) runs an algorithm that detects silence and transmits a packet that says "silence" and stops transmitting. When the silence is over it transmits another packet that wakes up the other end. While all this is happening a "comfort noise" is played to both party's handsets so it doesn't sound like the phone disconnected.
I don't know if Skype offers configuration of comfort noise and silence suppression because I do not use that service.
Nearly all the real VoIP providers do, and for a few years I have been using Broadvoice using my own VoIP devices for around $5 per month.
They're being revisionist. It was originally "Hybrid Digital" and then they changed their mind about it because eventually, say in 20 years, stations will convert to all-digital format and no longer be "hybrid."
Now they just say it's a nebulous, meaninglist string of two consonants to save face and help the public mistake HD for High Definition since everyone wants HD these days.
On the other hand, there is a local public broadcaster in our area (MHz Networks) that completely switched off their analog channel the moment they got their digital channel on the air. It has 5 subchannels on one channel and 4 subchannels on another, and none are High-Definition. And they don't say they're High Definition or HD; they just say "digital," just like the truth is.
That's right.
XM's music channels range from 96 kbit/sec to 32 kbit/sec.
HD Radio in hybrid mode offers a maximum of 150 kbit/sec, not including the subchannels and like I stated, the multicasting stations that use multiple subchannels will suffer in quality until full-digital (non-hybrid HD Radio) occurs which is not forseen until the very distant future.
Personally I don't like low-bitrate MP3. The new AOL Radio service uses files now instead of streaming and those files are 128 kbit/sec MP3 files which are decidedly low quality.
In any case I'm getting Mitch's HD Radio adapter as soon as I can find a controllable OEM radio that won't cost near $100.
Even with digital output you won't be keeping those HD Radio broadcasts for music listening purposes.
I have XM and Sirius with optical outputs and the sound being broadcast by them has fairly poor fidelity. If you're used to that, then you probably won't notice, but comparing any of the broadcasted digital formats (even internet radio) to anything you can download from iTunes is going to disappoint you.
HD Radio compares favorably to XM Satellite Radio since they use very similar audio codecs, but even then you're not going to like it for music. If the station you want to record is multicasting, meaning that it has more than one "channel" on one frequency, you're going to be disappointed unless it's a talk program.
The bandwidth for music on the multicasting HD Radio stations is not worth the cost to bother with optical outputs. Line level input will be more than you could need.
Naturally I meant to type "if you choose a highly-COMPRESSED codec, like G.729" up there.
Please visit www.rush2112.net for an adapter and controller for the Visteon HD Radio car unit and the one from Directed Electronics.
It can be used with a number of satellite radio recorders like SatAmp to record broadcasts and timeshift. It also comes with a demo and development kit if you like that sort of thing.
http://www.rush2112.net/mkportal/modules/oscommerce/product_info.php?products_id=39
I have his XM and Sirius adapters. They all work on the same principle by talking to a vehicle OEM tuner via the RS-232 port that they all have.
You would be REALLY surprised how well it works.
If you choose a highly-encrypted codec, like G.729, it takes less time to transmit your voice data than it takes you to speak it, so when you're done speaking the other side is better than 1/4 second behind you, and it's just like an analog satellite voice connection--some would say better because the fidelity is so much greater due to the codec.
Data transmission is not the problem, and neither is latency. People who use satellite phones are already used to the extended pause when one party stops talking and the other starts talking.
However, transmitting the data is no worse than analog, and with the right codec, you won't be struggling for bandwidth.
Most of these posts concern the Fair Access Policy limits and latency but you are probably excessively familiar with it already. I'm discussing how to solve your problem with access.
The key phrase that catches my eye in your question is that you are in remote, Northern Canada. The beams you are able to receive are at such an oblique angle you should feel lucky to get any service. As you know the satellites are over the equator. The latitude at which you are located is likely so far north that the satellite signal has to travel through so many hundreds of miles of murky atmosphere before it has to travel another 22,500 miles to the satellite. You might consider yourself fortunate that it even works at all at such a high latitude.
Northern Russia has an even bigger problem and they solved it with highly-elliptical orbits, sometimes called "tundra" orbits, but that requires some expensive ground equipment to track the birds and it's not even 100% available. The Antarctic uses huge C-band dishes and they're not even available at all times of data due to even more atmosphere attenuating the signal.
While you do not specifically mention the provider or the satellite format you are probably using a Ku-band system like Starband or HughesNet. WildBlue, while actively marketing to Canada, has most of its spotbeams aimed at just north of the Canadian border and they're at really oblique angles at that. Since WildBlue uses Ka-band it's out of the question for these distances and will be unavailable when the weather is rainy.
To solve this problem you'll be looking at expensive, non-consumer solutions that work in the C-band. Though the signals were somewhat weaker in the past, the newer satellites serving up north have surprisingly powerful C-band beams and, being in the C-band, they aren't affected by raindrops like Ku-band and Ka-band are, so the low angle in your location wouldn't be such a huge problem.
The following outfits provide this kind of specialized internet service. I hope they are useful to you.
For this kind of money, and the way C-band works, you can find dedicated transponder segments (and even entire transponders) so you will have a dedicated link.
This firm provides custom satellite solutions:
http://www.bcsatellite.net/
These sites have VSAT terminals for C-band (they do exist in case you were wondering):
http://www.satcomresources.com/VsatTransceivers.jsp
http://www.anacominc.com/prod_xc.html
Finally, you can punt and use Inmarsat terminals. They're not optimal but they can give you data in a pinch.
It will be really interesting to learn how all the Inktomi technology works and how it well it was integrated with Yahoo.
Right.
You should have used the "Preview" button!
Oh, is it? See the comment below.
Try again, troll.
Only two or three remote holes in the default install not from 33 years ago, in more than 10 years but not less than 33 years!
It's Virtual Places all over again.
Someone over at Ubique better get on the phone.
.
Wow. Yahoo definitely does not have stale search offerings or second-rate search technology.
Just because you're not the flavor-of-the-month search engine doesn't mean your technology is stale or second rate.
The only thing I can agree with is the unmotivated workforce--but they are in no way a mediocre bunch.
YHOO survived the dot-com bust because they are a well-diversified and complete web service company.
GOOG is striving to become that, but GOOG is flavor-of-the month because GOOG is the glamorous company that avoided the dot-com bust because they started later.
Come on, try to be objective when comparing YHOO and GOOG.
Good press does not necessarily mean better company.
Bad press does not necessarily mean worse company.
It's a shame so many of you feel this way without any sort of objective research.
.
You might call Microsoft the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy of the software industry. Use it until it outlasts its usefulness and then release it to the rest of the world for no charge.
Sorta.
Oh, I'm a little ashamed that I recognize this message as CORBA flamebait.
Thankfully an alternative to XML.
If you didn't think XML was among least efficient transport formats then you weren't really paying attention. Battery-conscious mobile devices do not really enjoy parsing XML DTD and then the XML file itself.
It reminds me a little bit of AOL's SNAC message types.
We get something good for the industry from Google, after a rash of bad press, and is actually NOT a beta.
PDF makes sense for document signing, security, and damage detection. TIFF does not have any of this important security and data integrity protection by itself.
PDF also allows for the same compression on the scanned image that TIFF does, as well as much better compression methods available to it.
TIFF, while well-understood in the archival industry, has rather fledgling support in the free *NIX world--especially multi-page TIFF.
Finally, with PDF, you can preserve both the image and the OCR data all in the same file. That's impossible with TIFF.
And, anyway, it's not 1985 anymore.
Disorganization?
Everything tagged "beta?"
Welcome to Google.
Have you released a product today?
This is because VIA's technology is encumbered by the patents and trade secrets of the companies they acquired.
S3, now owned by VIA, own several patents and trade secret IP in the video processors now known as VIA Unichrome. These are things like Savage, ProSavage, ViRGE, Vision, Aura, etc.
A similar situation exists with the sound hardware with trade secret IP owned by IC Ensemble, also acquired by VIA.
It's not as easy as it sounds.
Sometimes this trade secret IP uses technology licensed from other companies. VIA does not have the right nor the ability to ethically release this information to the public.
It's the northbridge, I believe.
I have several motherboards that use this configuration including some nForce boards. I think it's to make the leads as short as possible without too much of that wasteful zig-zagging that equalizes their lengths.
That's how some makers, like Dell, solved the problem of using AMD 64 processors on BTX boards (the BTX specification puts the processor too far away from the memory and moving the chipset at an angle leaves more room for memory leads since AMD puts the memory controller on the processor and Intel does not).