The British colonies in Australia were not merely founded as a dumping ground for criminals. There was a high strategic importance for a British colony in the Pacific - to thwart French ambitions must also be considered.
For example the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville arrived in what became French Polynesia in 1768 and claimed the islands for France. This roughly coincides with James Cook's first voyage of discovery (1768 - 1771) that resulted in the circumnavigation of New Zealand and the mapping of the east coast of Australia. There was definitely strong interest in the region from both the British and the French.
The unknown "Terra Australis" was seen as potentially an El Dorado, hiding great mineral and other natural wealth ready to be exploited. After all, the archipelago of Indonesia, then known as the Spice Islands, were an important source of income for the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese.
Establishing a penal colony in such a remote location was a low risk method of establishing a permenant presence. If the colony was lost, nobody would miss a few convicts, foolhardy free adventurers and a detachment of Marines. If the penal colony was a success, Britain had expanded her empire and thus power.
What I find unbelievable is this whole "P2P is illegal" thing.
Certain uses of P2P technology, which involves sharing of copywrited material is indeed illegal. However, there is nothing illegal about P2P technology in and of itself.
There also may be a problem in the BBC is not a company subject to the normal laws of the market. If they started to pull income from foreign media companies all hell would break loose.
The entire remit of BBC Worldwide is to secure licensing revenue from the commercial market, investing it directly back into the BBC. Last financial year BBC Worldwide directed £141 million back to the BBC. Of this BBC America, through 30 million subscriptions, advertising and licensing contributed a large proportion.
I think this sounds like a form of "international licence fee". BBC Worldwide and the BBC just need to start talking a bit more to each other and extend this model to something like the Creative Archive.
There's BBC Motion Gallery. Here you can view and download watermarked preview files of BBC archive content. This site is primarily aimed at commercial stock footage buyers.
There's also the BBC's Creative Archive, which is not yet launched.
iMP is just entering the second round of closed Beta testing I believe. It's not available for public Beta testing at this time.
I'd also recommend checking out some of the excellent historical footage on the British Pathe site. This archive is now represented by ITN.
I was really hoping that this service would be useful for professional researchers working in agencies and broadcasters for example. But it would seem that this isn't the case.
I conducted a simple search for the word "stoats" - let's pretend I'm putting together a wildlife documentary on the weasel's lesser known cousin.
Yahoo video search comes up with two results -
http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=stoat s&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&save=0
Yet, if I search for stoats on BBC Motion Gallery I get 4 results, including this little gem -
http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/customer/common/se arch/searchDetails.jsp?clipItemId=prod20370
...reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows.
I can't agree that the digital archives of any major network are in such a state that finding a clip can be described in terms of needle and haystack.
From my work with the BBC, on a project known as Motion Gallery I'd say that video footage already in a digital format is extensively catalogued and mapped to keyword architecture.
I am also aware of at least 4 other digital archive projects within the BBC. Some of these cover the digital storage of newly filmed material, others like Creative Archive are relevant to making historical footage available online.
The needle in a haystack metaphor is really only relevant to archive materials that are not digital and have been stored on tape or film. Then there is an issue around the cataloguing and ease of searching such material. Even so, the BBC has it's own search system known as Infax. Other broadcasters, such as ITN, have already made their text based archive search available on the Internet.
I think Google can certainly bring some interesting technology and approaches to searching video archive content. This could be in the area of better indexing for existing digital archive footage, or perhaps a search aggregation of text based archive systems in much the same way they provide an image search service now.
Can Google overcome the problem of poorly catalogued tape based media archives? In short no. They could however assist organisations to effectively structure their keyword hierachies when migrating to a digital video format.
I don't think Wikis should be used for important business documentation. However, for displaying the location of that document they are a great tool!
You're right in that business critical documentation should be owned and edited by only a small team. Making this documentation available to a wider audience is where a Wiki comes to the fore.
I've been running a Wiki in our department at work now for a couple of months. It was slow to start with, but people are starting to catch on now. Find a better way to do something? Add it to the Wiki. Know where all the spare printer paper is kept? Add it to the Wiki. Know the location on the network drive where the crucial licence agreements are kept? Add it to the Wiki. The list just keeps going on.
Wikis are great for sharing knowledge. Like any knowledge sharing initiative they require a knowledge champion to oversee new additions, assist users having problems and generally tidying up. They are a great collaborative tool when you have everyone's buy in. A real leveller in the workplace too. The newest temp can correct the managing director - anonymously if needs be.
Regardless of your subjective comments regarding The Guardian being "notoriously left-wing" and "pretty much a joke", I refute your statement that it "isn't a popular paper in the UK".
Latest reported figures show that The Guardian's daily circulation is running at 378,000 and daily readership is over 1 million. Add the 2.5 million unique UK users that accessed their website in September 2004 and I'd say that they are providing a reasonably popular service.
The official Audit Bureau of Statistics, where you'll need to construct your own search, puts The Guardian, and sister publication The Observer, ahead of titles such as The Evening Standard and The Independent.
I can't argue that The Guardian is one of the top most popular newspapers in terms of circulation, but it certainly isn't unpopular.
You're still probably watching "NTSC" based HD TV. Most HD broadcasts in the US today are in what's known as 1080/59.94i (to give it its full name). "1080i" stands for resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and the magic little 'i' means that the video is being interlaced. The "59.94", which is usually just rounded up to 60, refers to the Hz refresh rate. NTSC is at 60Hz, while PAL is generally at 50Hz.
Plus, most of the shows your watching have probably been upconverted from Standard Definition (SD). Granted, there's still a quality improvement over SD for upconverted footage, but it will largely depend on the originating format. So if a fairly newish show was originally produced on 16mm or 35mm file, or even DigiBeta tape, the upconversion will look pretty good. Older shows that may have been recored on 16mm, and others on formats like BetaSP or D3, will in general not have the same level of upconverted quality.
Actual production in HD is still in its infancy. And the whole NTSC vs PAL fun is about to begin again. The US seems to have adopted the 1080i HD standard, while Europe is leaning more towards 720p (progressive).
The problem is that the output streams are all coming from a single point. Although a post below suggests that caching at various points on the network could go a long way to alleviate this problem. Why not distribute movies via P2P?
Some major broadcasters are considering this method already. Have a look at the BBC's interactive Media Player (iMP).
OK, so this may not be true streaming in the generally accepted sense, but it will still produce pretty much on demand titles that you source from a node close to you. Set your PVR to download the titles you want and away you go.
The size of HD files are possibly the biggest issue here. Some recent investigation I did revealed that WMV 9 HD files will end up at about 16 MB for 20 seconds of 24fps at a resolution of 1280x720. That's about 4GB for a 90 minute movie. You'll need a pretty big pipe into your home no matter where the file is served from.
This is pretty much exactly what the BBC is currently trialling with their own product called iMP or interactive Media Player.
Their own webpages are a little light on content and mostly aimed at helping out the Beta testers, but more useful information can be found on varioussites.
iMP is P2P client that allows distribution of BBC programmes. There is a DRM component that stops a programme being watched 7 days after downloading. iMP is a great idea for the BBC as it has the potential to significantly reduce the infrastructure costs in terms of streaming and network bandwidth required. A big question for me though is how robust their DRM technology will prove to be.
For a reasonably well trafficed (say 30k unique visitors per month) and high profile (within its industry that is) B2B site I manage the figures for September are:
1 Internet Explorer 6.x 68.81% 2 Internet Explorer 5.x 8.48% 3 Firefox 8.00% 4 Safari 3.76% 5 Mozilla 1.69% 6 Opera 1.58% 7 Netscape 7.x 1.38% 8 Others 0.83%
Two months ago, the July figures were:
1 Internet Explorer 6.x 65.82% 2 Internet Explorer 5.x 10.60% 3 FireFox 5.07% 4 Safari 4.65% 5 Opera 2.13% 6 Mozilla 1.87% 7 Others 1.53% 8 Netscape 7.x 1.36%
A couple of things to note:
a) I might skew the figures a bit as I'm _always_ on the site and my usual browser of choice is Firefox. b) A lot of money was spent and the site launch was delayed so that Safari could be "supported" at the request of some very vocal senior team members. However, Firefox is not officially supported and in fact some key site functionality does not work as intended in this browser (iframes & embedded media problem). Yet Firefox has more activity than Safari on our site.
Firstly, I'd just like to mention that I've seen this wreck. I was sailing on the Medway and out into the Thames estuary. At low tide the towers and wheel house of this vessel are clearly visible above the water. While there is a buoy marked exclusion area around the ship you can still get pretty close, which is perhaps a worry.
Anyway, when I got back from my sailing weekend I did a little research on SS Richard Montgomery. The history is that the ship ran aground at neap tide. Troops were busy unloading the ordnance when the ship started breaking up. Further unloading deemed too dangerous. Incidently in later years an oil refinery was built nearby on the Isle of Grain, probably closer than the town Sheerness.
To quote from one of the articles I found in my research -
Of the three and a half thousand tons of explosives left, most contain TNT and are impervious to seawater. It is highly probable that their fuses have long since deteriorated and would therefore need something else to set them off. Unfortunately on the deck above these are approximately one hundred and seventy five tons of fragmentation cluster bombs fully armed and ready to go. These are considered to be the main danger, because if the decking collapses these bombs could fall on top of the others and set the whole thing off.
So it doesn't seem like the fuses are the problem, but the cluster bombs could possibly set off the TNT.
"Moreover, the layout of the keys deviates from the usual Qwerty configuration in several respects. For example, Nokia has elected to switch the positions of the "@" symbol and the double-quote keys from their usual Qwerty assignments."
Actually the locations of the @ and double-quote symbols are in exactly the same place as on all my regular desktop/laptop keyboards. The double-quote is above the number 2 (shift-2 to access) and the @ symbol above the single quote near the enter key (shift-' to access).
I think what the author of the review doesn't realise is that UK and US QWERTY keyboards have slightly different layouts. The switch of @ and double-quote being one of the differences. There's also, for example, a £ symbol above the number 3 (shift-3 to access) which is extremely useful when dealing with Pounds Sterling.
So as far as I can see Nokia hasn't elected switched anything. They've just produced a QWERTY keyboard based on the UK model.
I've had a 6820 for about 4 or 5 months now. It's an OK phone. I find that I can type SMS messages quicker using the fold out keyboard than even with predictive texting on and using the number pad. The camera is a bit crap and I rarely use it. As for other messaging capabilities, frankly I may not be a big enough geek because not enough of my friends have compatible devices that I can send to.
I have to agree that as soon as I saw the picture of the FlipStart I thought "that's my Psion 5mx". Such a shame that Psion couldn't keep producing their machines.
I loved my 5mx and still have it, although now it's just used as my morning wake up alarm. Infact I don't use any PDA at the moment as I haven't found one that really meets my needs. I just use my mobile phone for calendar and reminder functions.
I used an older Series 5 machine constantly when backpacking in southern Africa for about six months. I had the modem dongle connection. So while I was out and about I can write my journal or emails. Then when I got back to usually Cape Town or J'burg I could connect and send everything. I found it really useful. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as durable as your description of the Series 7 - the screen smashed when crushed in my luggage on the way home.
I'd certainly by another "hand top" machine if it resembled the usefulness of the Psion.
I used to work Dairys in Australia that graze the cattle in paddocks, rather than feedlots.
Generally the paddocks are strip grazed to prevent the cattle getting bloated. If you just let your herd into a fresh new paddock of lucerne they would keep on eating, fill with gas (bloat) and if severe enough eventually die. Just what you do not want from your $2000 cow.
So basically a portable electric fence is set up at a certain interval, allowing the cows to graze up to the fence. When the feed is exhausted, the fence is moved on another say 30 yards. In this way the cows feed intake is restricted.
So the WiFi/GPS system sounds like it could work pretty well. I must admit that on first starting to read the article, and the bit about how the sound deterents were not working, I thought about somehow still using the electric fence and moving it robotically.
So the fence is in position and instead of using insulated metal stakes in the ground at regular intervals, there were instead posts on wheels that we controlled by servers. Or indeed these posts could have their own WiFi receiver. The message is sent to the posts to move to a certain GPS co-ordinate.
In this way the cows are still prevented from moving across the demarcation line by the traditional electric fence. The cows also aren't wearing any devices - and trust me dairy cows will work out a way to destroy anything you put on them. It is instead the fence itself that is controlled remotely.
Infact, letting the imagination run a bit wilder, why not put webcams on top of each WiFi enabled fencpost, which are roughly 15-20 yards apart. In this way you could keep an eye on your herd (to check for things like bloat) without having to actually leave the house.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the not too distant future the BBC attempted to institute some type of subscription system for people accessing their online content from outside the UK. This may for example be based upon IP address. It won't be a perfect system, but I can see it being tried.
At the moment there is quite a big public debate occurring regarding how much money the BBC is spending on New Media initiatives. It is largely focussed on the premise that because the BBC has so many tax payer funded resources they are able to invest heavily in New Media and are thus stifling competing commercial operations.
It wouldn't surprise me to see this debate shift and focus on who should have access to the BBC New Media content for free - that is only UK based users.
The BBC does make a reasonable amount of income from their commercial subsidiaries - BBC Worldwide, BBC Technology, BBC Resources, BBC America etc. However, when compared to GBP121/year from every household in the UK with a television, the other contributions are pretty small - less than 10%.
Rights issues are a big deal for the Beeb. Yes, a lot of the stuff that they broadcast has been produced by other companies - whether it be broadcast companies or other indies. However, the Beeb does film a lot of its own stuff too. Their Natural History unit in Bristol is pretty big and they have a wealth of that type of material in their archive. Think David Attenborough - all his TV work is pretty much wholly BBC filmed.
It's going to be really interesting to see how Creative Archive handles these issues and I see Right Management as perhaps a bigger obstacle to overcome than anything to do with technology. Usually if someone like BBC Worldwide (commercial wholly owner subsidiary of the public service BBC) sells footage to a third party then they can manually manage any pay-aways to the original producers. Think sport - if BBCW sells sport footage that they have broadcast and originally filmed they still often have to pay the sporting group that "runs" the game. For example the Football Association. How Creative Archive manages this when they are providing the footage for free, even under the Creative Commons licence and for non-commercial use, is going to be a tough one to work out.
Of course that licence fee is paid for by UK taxpayers.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the BBC put some sort of restriction on some of their web content for users located outside of the UK- this could be especially true for high demand video content.
Difficult to police such a restriction perhaps, but to satisfy government mandates this may end up being the case. And remember that the licence charter is due for renewal in 2006.
Slashdot Mirror
The British colonies in Australia were not merely founded as a dumping ground for criminals. There was a high strategic importance for a British colony in the Pacific - to thwart French ambitions must also be considered.
For example the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville arrived in what became French Polynesia in 1768 and claimed the islands for France. This roughly coincides with James Cook's first voyage of discovery (1768 - 1771) that resulted in the circumnavigation of New Zealand and the mapping of the east coast of Australia. There was definitely strong interest in the region from both the British and the French.
The unknown "Terra Australis" was seen as potentially an El Dorado, hiding great mineral and other natural wealth ready to be exploited. After all, the archipelago of Indonesia, then known as the Spice Islands, were an important source of income for the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese.
Establishing a penal colony in such a remote location was a low risk method of establishing a permenant presence. If the colony was lost, nobody would miss a few convicts, foolhardy free adventurers and a detachment of Marines. If the penal colony was a success, Britain had expanded her empire and thus power.
What I find unbelievable is this whole "P2P is illegal" thing.
Certain uses of P2P technology, which involves sharing of copywrited material is indeed illegal. However, there is nothing illegal about P2P technology in and of itself.
There are large corporations out there that are working to build legitimate P2P applications for the benefit of the general public.
Where's the disconnect?
Well not quite..........
A commercial arm of the public BBC, BBC Worldwide, runs BBC America.
The entire remit of BBC Worldwide is to secure licensing revenue from the commercial market, investing it directly back into the BBC. Last financial year BBC Worldwide directed £141 million back to the BBC. Of this BBC America, through 30 million subscriptions, advertising and licensing contributed a large proportion.
I think this sounds like a form of "international licence fee". BBC Worldwide and the BBC just need to start talking a bit more to each other and extend this model to something like the Creative Archive.
There's also the BBC's Creative Archive, which is not yet launched.
iMP is just entering the second round of closed Beta testing I believe. It's not available for public Beta testing at this time.
I'd also recommend checking out some of the excellent historical footage on the British Pathe site. This archive is now represented by ITN.
...only old people post duplicate stories.
Maidenhead is a high capacity hosting facility that is owned and operated by Siemens (previously BBC Technology)
I conducted a simple search for the word "stoats" - let's pretend I'm putting together a wildlife documentary on the weasel's lesser known cousin.
Yahoo video search comes up with two results - http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=stoat s&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&save=0
Yet, if I search for stoats on BBC Motion Gallery I get 4 results, including this little gem - http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/customer/common/se arch/searchDetails.jsp?clipItemId=prod20370
Various other searches didn't seem to turn up much anything from other well known film archives such as Getty Images, Corbis Motion, National Geographic etc
I can't agree that the digital archives of any major network are in such a state that finding a clip can be described in terms of needle and haystack.
From my work with the BBC, on a project known as Motion Gallery I'd say that video footage already in a digital format is extensively catalogued and mapped to keyword architecture.
I am also aware of at least 4 other digital archive projects within the BBC. Some of these cover the digital storage of newly filmed material, others like Creative Archive are relevant to making historical footage available online.
The needle in a haystack metaphor is really only relevant to archive materials that are not digital and have been stored on tape or film. Then there is an issue around the cataloguing and ease of searching such material. Even so, the BBC has it's own search system known as Infax. Other broadcasters, such as ITN, have already made their text based archive search available on the Internet.
I think Google can certainly bring some interesting technology and approaches to searching video archive content. This could be in the area of better indexing for existing digital archive footage, or perhaps a search aggregation of text based archive systems in much the same way they provide an image search service now.
Can Google overcome the problem of poorly catalogued tape based media archives? In short no. They could however assist organisations to effectively structure their keyword hierachies when migrating to a digital video format.
You're right in that business critical documentation should be owned and edited by only a small team. Making this documentation available to a wider audience is where a Wiki comes to the fore.
I've been running a Wiki in our department at work now for a couple of months. It was slow to start with, but people are starting to catch on now. Find a better way to do something? Add it to the Wiki. Know where all the spare printer paper is kept? Add it to the Wiki. Know the location on the network drive where the crucial licence agreements are kept? Add it to the Wiki. The list just keeps going on.
Wikis are great for sharing knowledge. Like any knowledge sharing initiative they require a knowledge champion to oversee new additions, assist users having problems and generally tidying up. They are a great collaborative tool when you have everyone's buy in. A real leveller in the workplace too. The newest temp can correct the managing director - anonymously if needs be.
Regardless of your subjective comments regarding The Guardian being "notoriously left-wing" and "pretty much a joke", I refute your statement that it "isn't a popular paper in the UK".
Latest reported figures show that The Guardian's daily circulation is running at 378,000 and daily readership is over 1 million. Add the 2.5 million unique UK users that accessed their website in September 2004 and I'd say that they are providing a reasonably popular service.
The official Audit Bureau of Statistics, where you'll need to construct your own search, puts The Guardian, and sister publication The Observer, ahead of titles such as The Evening Standard and The Independent.
I can't argue that The Guardian is one of the top most popular newspapers in terms of circulation, but it certainly isn't unpopular.
Plus, most of the shows your watching have probably been upconverted from Standard Definition (SD). Granted, there's still a quality improvement over SD for upconverted footage, but it will largely depend on the originating format. So if a fairly newish show was originally produced on 16mm or 35mm file, or even DigiBeta tape, the upconversion will look pretty good. Older shows that may have been recored on 16mm, and others on formats like BetaSP or D3, will in general not have the same level of upconverted quality.
Actual production in HD is still in its infancy. And the whole NTSC vs PAL fun is about to begin again. The US seems to have adopted the 1080i HD standard, while Europe is leaning more towards 720p (progressive).
The problem is that the output streams are all coming from a single point. Although a post below suggests that caching at various points on the network could go a long way to alleviate this problem. Why not distribute movies via P2P?
Some major broadcasters are considering this method already. Have a look at the BBC's interactive Media Player (iMP).
OK, so this may not be true streaming in the generally accepted sense, but it will still produce pretty much on demand titles that you source from a node close to you. Set your PVR to download the titles you want and away you go.
The size of HD files are possibly the biggest issue here. Some recent investigation I did revealed that WMV 9 HD files will end up at about 16 MB for 20 seconds of 24fps at a resolution of 1280x720. That's about 4GB for a 90 minute movie. You'll need a pretty big pipe into your home no matter where the file is served from.
Their own webpages are a little light on content and mostly aimed at helping out the Beta testers, but more useful information can be found on various sites.
iMP is P2P client that allows distribution of BBC programmes. There is a DRM component that stops a programme being watched 7 days after downloading. iMP is a great idea for the BBC as it has the potential to significantly reduce the infrastructure costs in terms of streaming and network bandwidth required. A big question for me though is how robust their DRM technology will prove to be.
Perhaps the parent is referring to the Focke-Wulf 190. Although the spelling is still different.
For a reasonably well trafficed (say 30k unique visitors per month) and high profile (within its industry that is) B2B site I manage the figures for September are:
1 Internet Explorer 6.x 68.81%
2 Internet Explorer 5.x 8.48%
3 Firefox 8.00%
4 Safari 3.76%
5 Mozilla 1.69%
6 Opera 1.58%
7 Netscape 7.x 1.38%
8 Others 0.83%
Two months ago, the July figures were:
1 Internet Explorer 6.x 65.82%
2 Internet Explorer 5.x 10.60%
3 FireFox 5.07%
4 Safari 4.65%
5 Opera 2.13%
6 Mozilla 1.87%
7 Others 1.53%
8 Netscape 7.x 1.36%
A couple of things to note:
a) I might skew the figures a bit as I'm _always_ on the site and my usual browser of choice is Firefox.
b) A lot of money was spent and the site launch was delayed so that Safari could be "supported" at the request of some very vocal senior team members. However, Firefox is not officially supported and in fact some key site functionality does not work as intended in this browser (iframes & embedded media problem). Yet Firefox has more activity than Safari on our site.
Anyway, when I got back from my sailing weekend I did a little research on SS Richard Montgomery. The history is that the ship ran aground at neap tide. Troops were busy unloading the ordnance when the ship started breaking up. Further unloading deemed too dangerous. Incidently in later years an oil refinery was built nearby on the Isle of Grain, probably closer than the town Sheerness.
To quote from one of the articles I found in my research -
Of the three and a half thousand tons of explosives left, most contain TNT and are impervious to seawater. It is highly probable that their fuses have long since deteriorated and would therefore need something else to set them off. Unfortunately on the deck above these are approximately one hundred and seventy five tons of fragmentation cluster bombs fully armed and ready to go. These are considered to be the main danger, because if the decking collapses these bombs could fall on top of the others and set the whole thing off.
So it doesn't seem like the fuses are the problem, but the cluster bombs could possibly set off the TNT.
Actually the locations of the @ and double-quote symbols are in exactly the same place as on all my regular desktop/laptop keyboards. The double-quote is above the number 2 (shift-2 to access) and the @ symbol above the single quote near the enter key (shift-' to access).
I think what the author of the review doesn't realise is that UK and US QWERTY keyboards have slightly different layouts. The switch of @ and double-quote being one of the differences. There's also, for example, a £ symbol above the number 3 (shift-3 to access) which is extremely useful when dealing with Pounds Sterling.
So as far as I can see Nokia hasn't elected switched anything. They've just produced a QWERTY keyboard based on the UK model.
I've had a 6820 for about 4 or 5 months now. It's an OK phone. I find that I can type SMS messages quicker using the fold out keyboard than even with predictive texting on and using the number pad. The camera is a bit crap and I rarely use it. As for other messaging capabilities, frankly I may not be a big enough geek because not enough of my friends have compatible devices that I can send to.
I have to agree that as soon as I saw the picture of the FlipStart I thought "that's my Psion 5mx". Such a shame that Psion couldn't keep producing their machines.
I loved my 5mx and still have it, although now it's just used as my morning wake up alarm. Infact I don't use any PDA at the moment as I haven't found one that really meets my needs. I just use my mobile phone for calendar and reminder functions.
I used an older Series 5 machine constantly when backpacking in southern Africa for about six months. I had the modem dongle connection. So while I was out and about I can write my journal or emails. Then when I got back to usually Cape Town or J'burg I could connect and send everything. I found it really useful. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as durable as your description of the Series 7 - the screen smashed when crushed in my luggage on the way home.
I'd certainly by another "hand top" machine if it resembled the usefulness of the Psion.
I used to work Dairys in Australia that graze the cattle in paddocks, rather than feedlots.
Generally the paddocks are strip grazed to prevent the cattle getting bloated. If you just let your herd into a fresh new paddock of lucerne they would keep on eating, fill with gas (bloat) and if severe enough eventually die. Just what you do not want from your $2000 cow.
So basically a portable electric fence is set up at a certain interval, allowing the cows to graze up to the fence. When the feed is exhausted, the fence is moved on another say 30 yards. In this way the cows feed intake is restricted.
So the WiFi/GPS system sounds like it could work pretty well. I must admit that on first starting to read the article, and the bit about how the sound deterents were not working, I thought about somehow still using the electric fence and moving it robotically.
So the fence is in position and instead of using insulated metal stakes in the ground at regular intervals, there were instead posts on wheels that we controlled by servers. Or indeed these posts could have their own WiFi receiver. The message is sent to the posts to move to a certain GPS co-ordinate.
In this way the cows are still prevented from moving across the demarcation line by the traditional electric fence. The cows also aren't wearing any devices - and trust me dairy cows will work out a way to destroy anything you put on them. It is instead the fence itself that is controlled remotely.
Infact, letting the imagination run a bit wilder, why not put webcams on top of each WiFi enabled fencpost, which are roughly 15-20 yards apart. In this way you could keep an eye on your herd (to check for things like bloat) without having to actually leave the house.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the not too distant future the BBC attempted to institute some type of subscription system for people accessing their online content from outside the UK. This may for example be based upon IP address. It won't be a perfect system, but I can see it being tried.
At the moment there is quite a big public debate occurring regarding how much money the BBC is spending on New Media initiatives. It is largely focussed on the premise that because the BBC has so many tax payer funded resources they are able to invest heavily in New Media and are thus stifling competing commercial operations.
It wouldn't surprise me to see this debate shift and focus on who should have access to the BBC New Media content for free - that is only UK based users.
The BBC does make a reasonable amount of income from their commercial subsidiaries - BBC Worldwide, BBC Technology, BBC Resources, BBC America etc. However, when compared to GBP121/year from every household in the UK with a television, the other contributions are pretty small - less than 10%.
Rights issues are a big deal for the Beeb. Yes, a lot of the stuff that they broadcast has been produced by other companies - whether it be broadcast companies or other indies. However, the Beeb does film a lot of its own stuff too. Their Natural History unit in Bristol is pretty big and they have a wealth of that type of material in their archive. Think David Attenborough - all his TV work is pretty much wholly BBC filmed.
It's going to be really interesting to see how Creative Archive handles these issues and I see Right Management as perhaps a bigger obstacle to overcome than anything to do with technology. Usually if someone like BBC Worldwide (commercial wholly owner subsidiary of the public service BBC) sells footage to a third party then they can manually manage any pay-aways to the original producers. Think sport - if BBCW sells sport footage that they have broadcast and originally filmed they still often have to pay the sporting group that "runs" the game. For example the Football Association. How Creative Archive manages this when they are providing the footage for free, even under the Creative Commons licence and for non-commercial use, is going to be a tough one to work out.
Of course that licence fee is paid for by UK taxpayers.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the BBC put some sort of restriction on some of their web content for users located outside of the UK- this could be especially true for high demand video content.
Difficult to police such a restriction perhaps, but to satisfy government mandates this may end up being the case. And remember that the licence charter is due for renewal in 2006.