Similarly, there are other strange quirks. Sure, all the new consoles will have keyboards and everything, but they require special internet service -- I highly doubt they're PPP compliant, and Ethernet compliance? Probably not, in all fairness.
What on earth makes you think they can't plug an Ethernet card and write a simple piece of PPP software?
Lastly -- text on TVs is hard to read. It's getting better, but it will never be a computer monitor, because it's designed for an entirely different effect. Those of us who sit near our computer screens, for lack of a better `ergonomic' setup, can tell you that it looks vastly different from close up from a television.
You can use anti-twitter to improve the legibility of text (check out the Acorn set-top boxes). You will get lower resolution, but a lot of my non-techie friends actually prefer to run in 640x480 or 800x600 despite the fact their computer is capable of 1600x1200 because otherwise "the letters are too small". Oh, and people aren't going to shove their faces next to their telly as they would a monitor. They will sit in their normal comfy chair and use an IR keyboard. The display doesn't need to be better on telly than a monitor, just adequate.
Which direction do people think the wireless market will take:
from the direction of the PC, where new features appear on PCs first then get miniaturised and incorporated into mobiles (ala laptop/PDA)
features go first straight into mobiles, and rely on early adopters to absorb the costs to before it is brought to mass market.
I'm going to cop out and suggest a combination of both. Of course the question is moot if the PC finally manages to evolve. Personally I would like to see properly distributed processing. I don't see why the processor in my washing machine should be sitting around doing nothing except for one hour per week!
The first tells you that the document is the real thing, and hasn't been altered in any way. A digitally signed document is slightly different to a pen and ink document in that the former will garauntee that the document has not being altered but does not tell you if you are looking at the original or a copy. A pen and ink document does not garauntee that someone has not tampered with your document after signing but does tell you that you are looking at the original.
Non-repudability tells you that the person is who they say they are. Currently we have developed forensics to detect written forgery but as yet digital signature forgeries are 'perfect'. No doubt audit trails will be develop to enable similar forensic analysis for digital transactions. One thing to watch is the burden of proof. At the moment the consumer does not have to prove his signature is real in the event of a dispute, rather it is the other way around. Our sometimes rather blind faith in technology can swing this around (witness the protracted legal battles that *finally* persuaded banks to accept ATMs could make mistakes).
Just some food for thought. You could do worse that examine the British legislation going through parliament and the intelligent debates going on there. One source is FIPR (http://www.fipr.org/).
My RiscOS machine runs on StrongARM and handles.mov files fine. The browser is faster and more reliable than IE too. Come to think of it, Acorn demonstrated a Web pad along similar lines a couple of years ago (way too long ago to remember any details). Vaugely remember something along the lines of the ARM 7500 at 30mW? It had a bit of a heavy battery I think. Can anyone fill in the tech specs?
I like this idea a lot, and in fact is what I've been thinking about for a while. Stick a server in the airing cupboard, and then scatter a number of these thin clients around the house.
Have user 'kitchen' boot up with a browser full-screen and homepage set to simplyfood.co.uk. User 'study' can boot up a more traditional X terms type desktop. I'll let your imaginations do the rest.
Forget trying to ditch the keyboard though. Nobody is going to learn those 'chords' (look what happened to the Quinkey and similar). Just give the pad an IR port and drivers for all those IR keyboards you can buy ($30-$40 over here).
How the hell did bond get all those cool tuxedoes and gamble so much.....
Company perks (from your tone, I guess in your job you would call it an 'expense account').
Did you check out the pay scales...? £24k per *annum*....
Christ.... No wonder the british empire is in the state it is.
Either that or they have been on a pay freeze since the sixties... In which case supervillans have the edge now then.....
Few points:
You are not comparing like with like. On a direct conversion (ignoring cost of living, QoL, etc) even in the private sector the British earn considerable less than their American counterparts
The public sector always earn less that their private sector counterparts. They trade direct income for large budgets, greater security, greater freedom and (paradoxically) responsibility. If you work in the academic world you can expect to earn even less! (otoh you can't get fired unless your rotten corpse accidentally falls out of its chair)
You don't like snail mail from AOL, Microsoft, and a few other American based companies. Therefore you decide to go around to everyone's house and take any mail, coming from any American address, out of their mail boxes and you put all of that mail into a pile. In order to receive the mail, the recipients need to go grab the mail from the pile.
I don't have to pay to receive snail mail. Remember that in a lot of countries you have to pay for every byte you download (metered access). Having to pay to download spam on top of the time it wastes adds insult to injury.
You could argue that without the printing press, and the ability to both preserve and to disseminate knowledge reliably, the IC would never have been born.
the toilet
I'd rather have to pee in the street rather than lose my email:-)
"Broadcast 200 is GPL. Through the magic of credit, the development costs have been shielded from the user."
What are credits?
Extracts from the authors logs:
6/2/99 Ran out of money for the dedicated web server. Rather than use the software to pay for operating costs, we moved to freeyellow.com, the only free IPP allowing commercial content, just in case.
8/7/99 Defeated the latest anti-linux features on our download sites so now you can resume downloading the tarballs. Haven't been able to get money together for next year and there ain't no jobs for Linux hackers, so maybe it's time for a second master's degree. If you know any professors with grant money, harass author....OK, how about professors with no grant money.
12/1/99 The final release of Broadcast 2000 will be on Jan 10, 2000. We should have another loan secured by then and a license everyone can deal with. In the mean time, do well in school.
I guess the credits refers to all those bank loans he's been taking out so all of you can have free video editing software. Why don't you all club together and write him a set of references for his CV?
1) You end up shifting the pollution to the power generation stations
This is where electric cars work well in France but not in the UK. In the UK this would hold true, but in France around 80% of electricity is generated by nuclear power. The cars can just charge overnight, soaking up excess electricity that would have burned off otherwise.
I see no reason why taxpayers should be forced to pay for research that can and should be done in the private sector.>
Depends on the benefits to society of that research, along with the question as to whether that particular industry is focussed on short-term profit and would benefit from Government-industry partnership.
Since this has not happened, it's obvious that no such technology exists.
Make any calculations you like. With that kind of money, accidents will happen. Nasty accidents.
Also, if/. is REALLY serious about free speech, then why are posting rights only given to 3 people? Just a question.:)
Slashdot isn't a soapbox, it's "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". We come to read all the interesting stuff rather than having to trawl all around the web to find it. Those "3 people" pass on stuff that they think will be interesting to their peers. If you want to follow some political agenda then I'm sure there are other web sites out there more suited to you.
If I don't want to see Hot Grits, I browse at 2. If I didn't want to see SPAM that makes it into the submission queue, I would do the same thing
I don't understand. How would your reply filter strip spams from the submission queue?
But this is bigger than Rob Malda now.
Er, it's his magazine. He can do what he likes. Personally I don't think the submissions queue should be visible. I'm quite happy to rely on the editorial of the infamous duo to strip the wheat from the chaff for me. Thanks guys, you save me hours!
The human race has always placed importance on time landmarks. The end of a decade, the end of a century. This one is just bigger than the rest (end of year/decade/century/millenium). Why is this important? Simply because society as a whole has decided it is, the same as society tells us it's important to get a nice job, nice house, go to the right school, etc. Going a level deeper it gets more complicated. Why is the marking of time so important to a society? The sense that we are moving forwards? Relief we haven't destroyed the planet yet? I don't know.
Hubec tells us that it's the personal events in your life that are more important, but even many of our personal events are based on the marking of time. Turning 18 and becoming an adult (allegedly). 21st. Many get depressed on their 40th birthday (why not 39th or 41st?). A big momement in many people's lives is retirement which happens on the 65th birthday.
Personally I think last New Years Eve was a great excuse for a massive party. I've no intention of probing for any meaning to y2k. I do know it pulled nations together momentarily, families made that extra effort to get together, friends looked up old friends for reunions. I'm now going to forget about it until my future kid asks me what I did on the eve of the millenium. Then I'm going to shamelessly exagerate.
Phillip.
Superb - but how far will it go?
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 1
This is excellent news! RiscOS IMHO is the best and most productive GUI/OS ever conceived. The look and feel of the Filer is a good start. Other functionality I would love to see:
proper task bar (ie tasks being resident, and clicking launching new buffers under the same app rather than new apps, plus being able to access global configs etc from there)
transparency of being able to wander into zip/tar/etc files just as though they are normal directories
I presume file associations are supported? ie double click on a JPEG file and it is instantly displayed. Keep up the good work,
Hold on, why is having a gf so important? I'd get far more done if I didn't waste so much of my time on women. I quite envy my friend Martin, who has never had a gf and has no interest in one atm. He gets so much time to do cool stuff. He also has no idea of the heartaches these relationships can cause. He'll meet someone when the time is right for him. Until then, he isn't going to make himself miserable because he isn't obsessed with what the media tell him he should be obsessed with.
CGI scripts are rarely written with a specific web server or a specific platform in mind. Compilable code, such as C, or C++, is so unportable, because of all these "extensions" OS and compiler vendors insist on providing, that you would end up with more #ifdef's than actual lines of usable code, to get the same portability.
Not true. The C code is perfectly portable, only the binaries aren't. Unlike Perl scripts I've come across which require Perl 5.xxx installed to run.
CGI scripts often need tweaking, even after deployment on a live server. For a script, you just go into the cgi-bin directory, edit, save and you're done. The changes are now live. For compiled code, you obviously need to throw in the compile & link time, too, which is non-trivial.
First, you should never change the live site directly. Preferably you should have Development, Staging and Live (but just the first and last if on a budget). You make the changes on the development server and then migrate the changes to live after proper QA. Compile and link time is trivial. It would take me nearly the same time to compile and link a 1,500 line 1MB cgi as it would for you to save your Perl file.
As others have said, string handling in C/C++ is virtually non-existant.
True in the generic sense. On the other hand this is what makes C/CGI so fast. You tend to write string handling optimised to the case in hand as opposed to using a generic string handling routine.
Scripts can be used by anyone, and the interpreter is typically not that big. Compiled code requires sufficient privilages and disk space to install the compiler & libraries, which can be gigantic, and may be directory-specific. (eg: ld.so.2 prefers/lib. Installing it in your home directory can prove entertaining.)
Scripts tend to contain more generic code since they are usually 'borrowed' in the first place. C programs tend to be more targetted which makes canibalising them more difficult
Given the choice, personally I would use C for CGI (using RCS or CVS for very careful source control) and Perl for knocking up one off data processing scripts (eg deduct 20 credits from everyone in the database that lives in France). In reality I'm looking forwards to the day servlet based sites aren't dog slow. Then I would shift to that technology.
I have in fact the patent on using 'electro-magnetic radiation' striking something I call a 'retina' to transfer information. I intend to persue the licensing off this vigerously. In fact, hey YOU... that will be $5. You blinked, that's now $10. Hey buddy, it's too late. There's no point heading for that 'Back' butt...
At University I actually created my own 'suicide' command. Our system would not let you log out if you had any rogue processes, so you had to kill them individually before it would let you log out. Far quicker was my 'suicide', a shell script that extracted your root process and kill -9 it.
The advantage of my command is that then all your users can commit suicide individually.
Tell me - which makes more sense. Designing for compatibility or causing the 250 million people in this country who own NTSC TV's to junk their hardware? Boy- now that WOULD be a boon to the industry, and do the consumer no good at all.
Incorrect. You will need a box to interface between the digital signal and the analogue TV no matter what standard you decide on. The final analogue encoding (whether PAL or NTSC) is irrelevant to the standard.
Not to mention that the range of a TV broadcast is rather limited (line of sight and all).
TV broadcast limited by line of sight? I think you are mistaken.
No different from the problems associated with mobile reception of FM radio which is crap too
In Europe we have digital radio (Digital Audio Broadcasting, or DAB) which provides CD quality sound over the radio. Still new, so receivers are quite expensive.
In my experience, PAL is the superior standard (superior judged by quality of picture and resistance to vagueries in signal). NTSC has problems with colour. SECAM in France, the signal only has to degrade slightly for the picture to revert to black and white! Belgium uses PAL, but they stuck the sound on a different frequency which is rather annoying. Belgium borders on France so sells dual PAL/SECAM sets. It would have been nice to have had equipment I can use in both England and France. Pretty much all English video players can play PAL and NTSC.
Personally, I think the EU approach is pointless. We are quickly moving to a point where ALL audio and video traffic happens over TCP/IP (like Voice over IP for phone traffic and video conferencing for video traffic). Making a specialized wireless system for JUST digital TV is a waste. Spend the money on improving wireless bandwidths and then you can just broadcast the MPEG-2 video streams from your DVD directly to the wireless devices.
Data is data and I think if that you get broadbast wireless up and running (like the lucky folks in Tuscon, AZ have wireless T1s) the rest of the stuff...like broadcast of digital TV... will be simple.
Unfortunately TCP/IP is not necessarily the best protocol for video, the reasons being:
It does not have "Quality of Service" built in (you don't want your video signal breaking up every time your email arrives, you'd rather the email downloaded a little slower)
TCP garauntees all the packets arrive, and arrive in the correct order. This is not appropriate for video where if some packets go missing then there is virtually no loss in picture. You'd rather slight degradation than the video keep freezing whilst a stray packet is retransmitted.
There is some overhead with IP. As to whether the cost is worth it depends on bandwidth available etc.
I think you have misinterpreted the Slashdot Effect.
How would you know which people were/. people? We wouldn't even necessarily all link from/.
Yes you would. That is the definition of the Slashdot Effect, everyone seeing a link to a server on Slashdot and clicking on it at the same time (roughly). You can tell which are/. people by the HTTP_REFERRER environmental variable set by the HTTP server.
Maybe any browser running Netscape Linux or Mozilla gets denied? That won't win you many friends around here.
No, it's not based on the browser but the IP address of the last page that was served up.
Besides, what's the good of denying/.ers, but letting all the Yahoo!ers in? It's not like they're any sort of better viewer than us. Maybe even the opposite.
You are missing the point. Many web sites have a community or user group that relies on it as a valuable resource. The 'invasion' by thousands of strangers killing their web site could be mistaken for a denial of service attack. The previous author is trying to reduce the impact of the Slashdot to a manageable effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, there are other strange quirks. Sure, all the new consoles will have keyboards and everything, but they require special internet service -- I highly doubt they're PPP compliant, and Ethernet compliance? Probably not, in all fairness.
What on earth makes you think they can't plug an Ethernet card and write a simple piece of PPP software?
Lastly -- text on TVs is hard to read. It's getting better, but it will never be a computer monitor, because it's designed for an entirely different effect. Those of us who sit near our computer screens, for lack of a better `ergonomic' setup, can tell you that it looks vastly different from close up from a television.
You can use anti-twitter to improve the legibility of text (check out the Acorn set-top boxes). You will get lower resolution, but a lot of my non-techie friends actually prefer to run in 640x480 or 800x600 despite the fact their computer is capable of 1600x1200 because otherwise "the letters are too small". Oh, and people aren't going to shove their faces next to their telly as they would a monitor. They will sit in their normal comfy chair and use an IR keyboard. The display doesn't need to be better on telly than a monitor, just adequate.
Phillip.
Which direction do people think the wireless market will take:
I'm going to cop out and suggest a combination of both. Of course the question is moot if the PC finally manages to evolve. Personally I would like to see properly distributed processing. I don't see why the processor in my washing machine should be sitting around doing nothing except for one hour per week!
Phillip.
Signing a document has two purposes:
The first tells you that the document is the real thing, and hasn't been altered in any way. A digitally signed document is slightly different to a pen and ink document in that the former will garauntee that the document has not being altered but does not tell you if you are looking at the original or a copy. A pen and ink document does not garauntee that someone has not tampered with your document after signing but does tell you that you are looking at the original.
Non-repudability tells you that the person is who they say they are. Currently we have developed forensics to detect written forgery but as yet digital signature forgeries are 'perfect'. No doubt audit trails will be develop to enable similar forensic analysis for digital transactions. One thing to watch is the burden of proof. At the moment the consumer does not have to prove his signature is real in the event of a dispute, rather it is the other way around. Our sometimes rather blind faith in technology can swing this around (witness the protracted legal battles that *finally* persuaded banks to accept ATMs could make mistakes).
Just some food for thought. You could do worse that examine the British legislation going through parliament and the intelligent debates going on there. One source is FIPR (http://www.fipr.org/).
Phillip.
My RiscOS machine runs on StrongARM and handles .mov files fine. The browser is faster and more reliable than IE too. Come to think of it, Acorn demonstrated a Web pad along similar lines a couple of years ago (way too long ago to remember any details). Vaugely remember something along the lines of the ARM 7500 at 30mW? It had a bit of a heavy battery I think. Can anyone fill in the tech specs?
Phillip.
I like this idea a lot, and in fact is what I've been thinking about for a while. Stick a server in the airing cupboard, and then scatter a number of these thin clients around the house.
Have user 'kitchen' boot up with a browser full-screen and homepage set to simplyfood.co.uk. User 'study' can boot up a more traditional X terms type desktop. I'll let your imaginations do the rest.
Forget trying to ditch the keyboard though. Nobody is going to learn those 'chords' (look what happened to the Quinkey and similar). Just give the pad an IR port and drivers for all those IR keyboards you can buy ($30-$40 over here).
Phillip.
How the hell did bond get all those cool tuxedoes and gamble so much.....
Company perks (from your tone, I guess in your job you would call it an 'expense account').
Did you check out the pay scales...? £24k per *annum*....
Christ.... No wonder the british empire is in the state it is.
Either that or they have been on a pay freeze since the sixties... In which case supervillans have the edge now then.....
Few points:
Phillip.
You don't like snail mail from AOL, Microsoft, and a few other American based companies. Therefore you decide to go around to everyone's house and take any mail, coming from any American address, out of their mail boxes and you put all of that mail into a pile. In order to receive the mail, the recipients need to go grab the mail from the pile.
I don't have to pay to receive snail mail. Remember that in a lot of countries you have to pay for every byte you download (metered access). Having to pay to download spam on top of the time it wastes adds insult to injury.
Phillip.
the integrated circuit
You could argue that without the printing press, and the ability to both preserve and to disseminate knowledge reliably, the IC would never have been born.
the toilet
I'd rather have to pee in the street rather than lose my email :-)
Phillip.
From README.src:
"Broadcast 200 is GPL. Through the magic of credit, the development costs have been shielded from the user."
What are credits?
Extracts from the authors logs:
6/2/99 Ran out of money for the dedicated web server. Rather than use the software to pay for operating costs, we moved to freeyellow.com, the only free IPP allowing commercial content, just in case.
8/7/99 Defeated the latest anti-linux features on our download sites so now you can resume downloading the tarballs. Haven't been able to get money together for next year and there ain't no jobs for Linux hackers, so maybe it's time for a second master's degree. If you know any professors with grant money, harass author....OK, how about professors with no grant money.
12/1/99 The final release of Broadcast 2000 will be on Jan 10, 2000. We should have another loan secured by then and a license everyone can deal with. In the mean time, do well in school.
I guess the credits refers to all those bank loans he's been taking out so all of you can have free video editing software. Why don't you all club together and write him a set of references for his CV?
Phillip.
MP3 is short-hand for MPEG1 - Layer 3.
Phillip.
1) You end up shifting the pollution to the power generation stations
This is where electric cars work well in France but not in the UK. In the UK this would hold true, but in France around 80% of electricity is generated by nuclear power. The cars can just charge overnight, soaking up excess electricity that would have burned off otherwise.
Phillip.
I see no reason why taxpayers should be forced to pay for research that can and should be done in the private sector.>
Depends on the benefits to society of that research, along with the question as to whether that particular industry is focussed on short-term profit and would benefit from Government-industry partnership.
Since this has not happened, it's obvious that no such technology exists.
Make any calculations you like. With that kind of money, accidents will happen. Nasty accidents.
Phillip.
Also, if /. is REALLY serious about free speech, then why are posting rights only given to 3 people? Just a question. :)
Slashdot isn't a soapbox, it's "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". We come to read all the interesting stuff rather than having to trawl all around the web to find it. Those "3 people" pass on stuff that they think will be interesting to their peers. If you want to follow some political agenda then I'm sure there are other web sites out there more suited to you.
Phillip.
If I don't want to see Hot Grits, I browse at 2. If I didn't want to see SPAM that makes it into the submission queue, I would do the same thing
I don't understand. How would your reply filter strip spams from the submission queue?
But this is bigger than Rob Malda now.
Er, it's his magazine. He can do what he likes. Personally I don't think the submissions queue should be visible. I'm quite happy to rely on the editorial of the infamous duo to strip the wheat from the chaff for me. Thanks guys, you save me hours!
Phillip.
The human race has always placed importance on time landmarks. The end of a decade, the end of a century. This one is just bigger than the rest (end of year/decade/century/millenium). Why is this important? Simply because society as a whole has decided it is, the same as society tells us it's important to get a nice job, nice house, go to the right school, etc. Going a level deeper it gets more complicated. Why is the marking of time so important to a society? The sense that we are moving forwards? Relief we haven't destroyed the planet yet? I don't know.
Hubec tells us that it's the personal events in your life that are more important, but even many of our personal events are based on the marking of time. Turning 18 and becoming an adult (allegedly). 21st. Many get depressed on their 40th birthday (why not 39th or 41st?). A big momement in many people's lives is retirement which happens on the 65th birthday.
Personally I think last New Years Eve was a great excuse for a massive party. I've no intention of probing for any meaning to y2k. I do know it pulled nations together momentarily, families made that extra effort to get together, friends looked up old friends for reunions. I'm now going to forget about it until my future kid asks me what I did on the eve of the millenium. Then I'm going to shamelessly exagerate.
Phillip.
This is excellent news! RiscOS IMHO is the best and most productive GUI/OS ever conceived. The look and feel of the Filer is a good start. Other functionality I would love to see:
I presume file associations are supported? ie double click on a JPEG file and it is instantly displayed. Keep up the good work,
Phillip.
Hold on, why is having a gf so important? I'd get far more done if I didn't waste so much of my time on women. I quite envy my friend Martin, who has never had a gf and has no interest in one atm. He gets so much time to do cool stuff. He also has no idea of the heartaches these relationships can cause. He'll meet someone when the time is right for him. Until then, he isn't going to make himself miserable because he isn't obsessed with what the media tell him he should be obsessed with.
Phillip.
CGI scripts are rarely written with a specific web server or a specific platform in mind. Compilable code, such as C, or C++, is so unportable, because of all these "extensions" OS and compiler vendors insist on providing, that you would end up with more #ifdef's than actual lines of usable code, to get the same portability.
Not true. The C code is perfectly portable, only the binaries aren't. Unlike Perl scripts I've come across which require Perl 5.xxx installed to run.
CGI scripts often need tweaking, even after deployment on a live server. For a script, you just go into the cgi-bin directory, edit, save and you're done. The changes are now live. For compiled code, you obviously need to throw in the compile & link time, too, which is non-trivial.
First, you should never change the live site directly. Preferably you should have Development, Staging and Live (but just the first and last if on a budget). You make the changes on the development server and then migrate the changes to live after proper QA. Compile and link time is trivial. It would take me nearly the same time to compile and link a 1,500 line 1MB cgi as it would for you to save your Perl file.
As others have said, string handling in C/C++ is virtually non-existant.
True in the generic sense. On the other hand this is what makes C/CGI so fast. You tend to write string handling optimised to the case in hand as opposed to using a generic string handling routine.
Scripts can be used by anyone, and the interpreter is typically not that big. Compiled code requires sufficient privilages and disk space to install the compiler & libraries, which can be gigantic, and may be directory-specific. (eg: ld.so.2 prefers /lib. Installing it in your home directory can prove entertaining.)
Scripts tend to contain more generic code since they are usually 'borrowed' in the first place. C programs tend to be more targetted which makes canibalising them more difficult
Given the choice, personally I would use C for CGI (using RCS or CVS for very careful source control) and Perl for knocking up one off data processing scripts (eg deduct 20 credits from everyone in the database that lives in France). In reality I'm looking forwards to the day servlet based sites aren't dog slow. Then I would shift to that technology.
Phillip.
I have in fact the patent on using 'electro-magnetic radiation' striking something I call a 'retina' to transfer information. I intend to persue the licensing off this vigerously. In fact, hey YOU... that will be $5. You blinked, that's now $10. Hey buddy, it's too late. There's no point heading for that 'Back' butt...
At University I actually created my own 'suicide' command. Our system would not let you log out if you had any rogue processes, so you had to kill them individually before it would let you log out. Far quicker was my 'suicide', a shell script that extracted your root process and kill -9 it.
The advantage of my command is that then all your users can commit suicide individually.
Tell me - which makes more sense. Designing
for compatibility or causing the 250 million
people in this country who own NTSC TV's to
junk their hardware? Boy- now that WOULD be
a boon to the industry, and do the consumer
no good at all.
Incorrect. You will need a box to interface between the digital signal and the analogue TV no matter what standard you decide on. The final analogue encoding (whether PAL or NTSC) is irrelevant to the standard.
Phillip.
Not to mention that the range of a TV broadcast is rather limited (line of sight and all).
TV broadcast limited by line of sight? I think you are mistaken.
No different from the problems associated with mobile reception of FM radio which is crap too
In Europe we have digital radio (Digital Audio Broadcasting, or DAB) which provides CD quality sound over the radio. Still new, so receivers are quite expensive.
Phillip.
In my experience, PAL is the superior standard (superior judged by quality of picture and resistance to vagueries in signal). NTSC has problems with colour. SECAM in France, the signal only has to degrade slightly for the picture to revert to black and white! Belgium uses PAL, but they stuck the sound on a different frequency which is rather annoying. Belgium borders on France so sells dual PAL/SECAM sets. It would have been nice to have had equipment I can use in both England and France. Pretty much all English video players can play PAL and NTSC.
Phillip.
Data is data and I think if that you get broadbast wireless up and running (like the lucky folks in Tuscon, AZ have wireless T1s) the rest of the stuff...like broadcast of digital TV... will be simple.
Unfortunately TCP/IP is not necessarily the best protocol for video, the reasons being:
Phillip.
I think you have misinterpreted the Slashdot Effect.
/. people? We wouldn't even necessarily all link from /.
/. people by the HTTP_REFERRER environmental variable set by the HTTP server.
/.ers, but letting all the Yahoo!ers in? It's not like they're any sort of better viewer than us. Maybe even the opposite.
How would you know which people were
Yes you would. That is the definition of the Slashdot Effect, everyone seeing a link to a server on Slashdot and clicking on it at the same time (roughly). You can tell which are
Maybe any browser running Netscape Linux or Mozilla gets denied? That won't win you many friends around here.
No, it's not based on the browser but the IP address of the last page that was served up.
Besides, what's the good of denying
You are missing the point. Many web sites have a community or user group that relies on it as a valuable resource. The 'invasion' by thousands of strangers killing their web site could be mistaken for a denial of service attack. The previous author is trying to reduce the impact of the Slashdot to a manageable effect.
Phillip.