In one of his articles he notes that they're still only using MPEG-2, not the other, better codecs. This could easily account for the lack of quality.
Better in comparison to what? MPEG2 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 is still used for studio and satellite. The shows you see on HD sets were high data rate MPEG2 4:2:2 coming over the satellite and later downconverted to 4:2:0 for 8VSB transmission. HBO-HD is MPEG2 on C-Band. It seems to me given a high enough bitrate, MPEG2 will look the same, if not better, as MPEG4 AVC. MPEG4 AVC is "better" because good quality video can be had at a lower bitrate.
I would imaging that since broadcast TV is all MPEG2 based, studios will be using MPEG2 for some time to come. Only consumer satellite companies like DirecTV and Dishnet are using MPEG4 for broadcasting HD. The reason is they want to maximize their bandwidth and still get a decent picture. If you want the "best" picture a person would want to get the network MPEG2 feeds off C-Band.
But what I'm really afraid of is that, despite whatever scientific significance such a trial could have, the religious right will immediately jump on this and squelch it without giving it any sort of chance. At least, hopefully, we can get the scientific advances later from countries that are more willing to do the research.
What frightens me is that even with proven advances in adult stem cells, some people squelch it for research that has inherent problems with the body rejecting the cells. These people claim that anti-science religious groups are attacking them. Huh?
CO2 isn't a pollutant in and of itself. Plants need it. The question is how much is too much? Even that we don't know. There have been studies that say increasing CO2 will stimulate plant growth. On the other hand too much CO2 can lead to other problems.
I don't remember how I stumbled on this web site. They seem to be pretty fair there. It looks like they have good information and discussion. Anyone know more about the "Roger A. Pielke Sr. Research Group" out of Colorado State?
Here is a article that includes a link to a paper on NASA temperature data.
Oh yeah? And how many ISP's are you directly peered with? I doubt manybe people get half their bandwidth for free like Yahoo does, specially given how much data Yahoo transfers *each second*.
It seems to me that we would have to outlaw direct peering of content providers with ISP's because they get a short-cut and lower latency.
Why oh why on a technical web site like slashdot people keep missing peering agreements? Only big company's like Yahoo and Google have the content lots and lots of people want. Because of this, big ISP's want to directly peer with large content companies. This saves both companies money by keeping traffic off their transit links. It also gives the content provider a short cut to the consumer. Less hops and lower latency. Is this fair to the little guy?
Sometimes constituents are wrong. In cases like that, it takes solid leadership and communication skills to show why something that seems intuitively right is actually wrong long-term. It seems to me these days that people opt too much for the immediate outcome. They do no know enough about how free markets work to see what the possible long-term out come could be. Time and time again free markets work and work well. When there is corruption it should be punished. Otherwise, just let the market work.
For popular live events, nothing can beat RF (radio/tv). It's broadcast. Until we can figure out how to make a secure and smooth multicast enabled, Internet RF will continue to perform better. For niche interest, the Internet is a perfect conduit. It's when something becomes too popular the economics start to breakdown. Companies like Akamai help with this by providing streaming servers all over the world in important peer points.
FYI, for people in North America, XM Satellite Radio is broadcasting World Cup coverage.
From this link: "Most custom clients would probably want a purchase option. Crabill says future plans call for a possible rent-to-own model in which consumers could burn movies to a DVD after paying a purchase fee. Digital rights management issues currently prevent that option, but company officials see future applications in which the MovieBeam box connects to a DVD recorder or Media Center PC for recording."
The box has an Ethernet on it. I saw another article that mentioned that Disney wants to convince the other studios to allow customers to save the movie to disc. Think about it. They's just talking DVD right now, but what about the future? This is Disney trying to kill future media wars. HD movies that you could save to Blu-ray or HD-DVD? Sounds good to me.
Another article I read about this service a couple of months ago said that Disney was trying to convince other studios to allow them to send the movie through Moviebeam and allow the user to purchase and save the movie to disc. It seems to me that Disney could get around the media war by allowing the customer to choose the media they want to use. I wish slashdot allowed me to pull up the article I submitted so I could provide the link to the comment by the Moviebeam/Disney exec.
I read an article about this about two months ago where a Disney/Moviebeam exec mentioned that they want to convince other studios to allow burning the movies to disc. Now this is a truely good idea. Disney could bypass the whole HD media battle. Allow the user to purchase the movie through the Moviebeam service and burn it to whatever media they want.
People, there is already a tiered Internet with large content providers directly peering with ISP's! A smart VoIP company would put servers in strategic colos and directly peer with as many ISP's in the area. Is this unfair to other VoIP companies?
The idea that no one "owns" the net itself should be inviolate. I already am charged for the bandwidth that comes off my servers because of the cost incurred by my ISP for upstream bandwidth.... and the big guys don't pay for all their bandwidth either. I'm surprised that no one on slashdot brings up peering. Yahoo apparently only pays for half of it's bandwidth. The other half of their bandwidth requirements flow over direct peering links to ISP's. Is this unfair? It saves the ISP money and the content provider money. Plus they get a short-cut -- lower latency, less hops. My gosh, that seems like an unfair advantage! Do you get free bandwidth for your servers?
Another thing is that I imagine that colo companies may pay for tiering and advertise that to their customers. This would allow any old blog to get special handling at a large colo.
It seems to me that very few people have actually thought more than two steps ahead on the economics of a tiered Internet. Personally, I would be interested to see how the marketplace would work out. I suspect it will not be like the FUD says it will be.
Last I checked FreeBSD's iSCSI target wasn't as mature as Linux's. I'll take another look. I did notice that FreeBSD had a scsi_target in 4.7 days, but I don't remember 4.7 having a nice, integrated, LVM like Linux did at the time.
I had not heard of Openfiler before. It looks pretty interesting. Differences from FreeNAS that I noticed are:
o Linux based o iSCSI target and initiator (SAN) support
I've been using the "Enterprise iSCSI Target" for Linux for a while now and it works pretty good. I serve up LVM slices to a Windows 2000 Server without trouble. The combination of EIT and LVM provide a lot of high end SAN features.
With redards to SAN features, I'm really looking forward to a unification of SCSI target drivers on Linux (http://stgt.berlios.de/) so that Linux can serve up LVM block devices over fibre channel. This would make Linux a very good platform for a SAN operating system.
One more follow-up... CALEA says: (2) expeditiously isolating and enabling the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, to access call-identifying information that is reasonably available to the carrier--
What we all need to find out is what "other lawful authorization" is.
It doesn't really matter what telco you go to. They all fall under CALEA.
I do understand your fine point but one continues to have the right to demand that the phone company not sell your records or distribute your records to third parties and I have done that.
You missed the point. CPNI is not your data. It's the phone company's data. Your data is the contents of the call. There has been some change in the law with regards to this, but I don't know how much. It also, apparently, varies state to state.
CALEA might cover some of this stuff. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what provisions laws like CALEA allow for.
I hoping that gnuradio gets some more momentum. Think of all the possibilities! I think things could get very interesting with experimental digital modulation. I haven't played around much with gnuradio since I don't have a USRP. It seems to me that the software is a little hard to use. I keep my eye on the project hoping that things will continue to move along and get easier to use.
Once things move along it would be nice to have a portable gnuradio hardware that could interface to a PDA for HT uses.
I think some of the confusion about this call record thing is that CPNI information is (used to be?) telco owned data. That means we (the customer) don't own the data. We only "own" the contents of the call. The page linked above talks about how telco's used to tell this data. You can't sell something you don't own. They did own it and they did sell it. There are newer laws that try to control the discloser of this information, but I'm not sure it's all been worked out yet. Maybe some one else around here has more information on this.
That's why CPNI data is treated differently than a phone tap. Even if the government gets this:
"call-identifying information effected within its switching premises can be activated only in accordance with a court order or other lawful authorization."
They have to go through further hoops to tap (listen in) a call. So far what has come out of the newspaper articles is that the NSA is tapping (getting contents) international calls. They've always had this capibility. They are also getting CNPI data from the phone companies. Two different things. Two different ways of handling the information.
Indeed, that would tend to hamstring those who have said that without "limited liability corporations" nothing would get done.
It also shows that big giant monopoly (evil?) companies are not all corporations. Evil is evil no matter what form it takes. Getting rid of corporations doesn't get rid of evil. On the other hand having corporations is a good thing. Corporations answer to their stock holders, not just to themselves. And anyone could make (or lose) some money off a corporation's stock.
I find that most people have no idea what limited liability is. It's pretty sad. People think it's some sort of stay out of jail card when it has nothing to do with that. Movies like "The Corporation" try to imply this is the case. It's shameful.
Personally, I like reminding people that neither Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel were corporations. It kinda takes the wind out of people's sails.:)
I've always used SprintPCS for data. Pricing seems to be the most fair of any provider and they are always on the leading edge of high speed wireless.
From the SprintPCS site for their Power Vision phones:
Phone as Modem Capable Use the included USB cable or Bluetooth Wireless technology to connect to a PC allowing Internet and email access.
It seems that SprintPCS is more open to everyone using their phones for Internet Access. A friend of mine purchased a Verizon phone and couldn't use the dialup feature without upping the per month pricing significantly (at least $59.99 versus Sprint's $39.99 unlimited plan). Even on my older SprintPCS phone I never had problems using at as a modem.
The Bitpim project works to provide syncronization with all BREW based phones via Bluetooth or USB cable. Bitpim supports more sync features on some phone models than others. For Windows, there is commercial full sync software for pretty much any BREW phone.
Initially Verizon had better and higher speed coverage than SprintPCS, but it appears that SprintPCS has overtaking them. According to the April 24, 2006 Infoworld, it states that Sprint's coverage is 219 major metro markets and 470 airports. It lists Verizon's coverage at 180 major metro areas.
The firmware was great on the Archos Jukebox players. The version I tried on my Nano worked basically the same way as the Archos Jukebox Rockbox firmware, but that was the problem. Apple's interface on the iPod is really, really, really well done. It's nice that Rockbox provides support for more codecs, but if they want people to use it on an iPod they need to make some major interface adjustments. Rockbox seemed very clunky compaired to the native interface. The fonts stink compared to the native firmware.
I hope that they make more headway, but for now, I'm sticking with the native firmware.
I do wish that Apple supported Ogg. I don't really care about mp3's anymore. Ogg and MP4 are the future. They are proper media containers and mp3 files are not. Since iPods support MP4, I rip to MP4 these days.
Sure you can. If you put 'linux reiserfs' or 'linux xfs' on the boot prompt, it will later present you with those options during the partitioning. It's been that way for a while, at least since FC1. Unless they've removed it for some reason, it should still have that feature in FC5.
Reiserfs is discouraged nowadays. I think it's because of lack of support for certain things like quotas, ACL's, and SELinux tags.
Slashdot Mirror
In one of his articles he notes that they're still only using MPEG-2, not the other, better codecs. This could easily account for the lack of quality.
Better in comparison to what? MPEG2 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 is still used for studio and satellite. The shows you see on HD sets were high data rate MPEG2 4:2:2 coming over the satellite and later downconverted to 4:2:0 for 8VSB transmission. HBO-HD is MPEG2 on C-Band. It seems to me given a high enough bitrate, MPEG2 will look the same, if not better, as MPEG4 AVC. MPEG4 AVC is "better" because good quality video can be had at a lower bitrate.
I would imaging that since broadcast TV is all MPEG2 based, studios will be using MPEG2 for some time to come. Only consumer satellite companies like DirecTV and Dishnet are using MPEG4 for broadcasting HD. The reason is they want to maximize their bandwidth and still get a decent picture. If you want the "best" picture a person would want to get the network MPEG2 feeds off C-Band.
But what I'm really afraid of is that, despite whatever scientific significance such a trial could have, the religious right will immediately jump on this and squelch it without giving it any sort of chance. At least, hopefully, we can get the scientific advances later from countries that are more willing to do the research.
What frightens me is that even with proven advances in adult stem cells, some people squelch it for research that has inherent problems with the body rejecting the cells. These people claim that anti-science religious groups are attacking them. Huh?
Please stop breathing. ;)
CO2 isn't a pollutant in and of itself. Plants need it. The question is how much is too much? Even that we don't know. There have been studies that say increasing CO2 will stimulate plant growth. On the other hand too much CO2 can lead to other problems.
I don't remember how I stumbled on this web site. They seem to be pretty fair there. It looks like they have good information and discussion. Anyone know more about the "Roger A. Pielke Sr. Research Group" out of Colorado State?
Here is a article that includes a link to a paper on NASA temperature data.
New Christy and Spencer Report on Satellite Temperature Data
Oh yeah? And how many ISP's are you directly peered with? I doubt manybe people get half their bandwidth for free like Yahoo does, specially given how much data Yahoo transfers *each second*.
It seems to me that we would have to outlaw direct peering of content providers with ISP's because they get a short-cut and lower latency.
Why oh why on a technical web site like slashdot people keep missing peering agreements? Only big company's like Yahoo and Google have the content lots and lots of people want. Because of this, big ISP's want to directly peer with large content companies. This saves both companies money by keeping traffic off their transit links. It also gives the content provider a short cut to the consumer. Less hops and lower latency. Is this fair to the little guy?
Sometimes constituents are wrong. In cases like that, it takes solid leadership and communication skills to show why something that seems intuitively right is actually wrong long-term. It seems to me these days that people opt too much for the immediate outcome. They do no know enough about how free markets work to see what the possible long-term out come could be. Time and time again free markets work and work well. When there is corruption it should be punished. Otherwise, just let the market work.
For popular live events, nothing can beat RF (radio/tv). It's broadcast. Until we can figure out how to make a secure and smooth multicast enabled, Internet RF will continue to perform better. For niche interest, the Internet is a perfect conduit. It's when something becomes too popular the economics start to breakdown. Companies like Akamai help with this by providing streaming servers all over the world in important peer points.
FYI, for people in North America, XM Satellite Radio is broadcasting World Cup coverage.
From this link:
"Most custom clients would probably want a purchase option. Crabill says future plans call for a possible rent-to-own model in which consumers could burn movies to a DVD after paying a purchase fee. Digital rights management issues currently prevent that option, but company officials see future applications in which the MovieBeam box connects to a DVD recorder or Media Center PC for recording."
The box has an Ethernet on it. I saw another article that mentioned that Disney wants to convince the other studios to allow customers to save the movie to disc. Think about it. They's just talking DVD right now, but what about the future? This is Disney trying to kill future media wars. HD movies that you could save to Blu-ray or HD-DVD? Sounds good to me.
Another article I read about this service a couple of months ago said that Disney was trying to convince other studios to allow them to send the movie through Moviebeam and allow the user to purchase and save the movie to disc. It seems to me that Disney could get around the media war by allowing the customer to choose the media they want to use. I wish slashdot allowed me to pull up the article I submitted so I could provide the link to the comment by the Moviebeam/Disney exec.
I read an article about this about two months ago where a Disney/Moviebeam exec mentioned that they want to convince other studios to allow burning the movies to disc. Now this is a truely good idea. Disney could bypass the whole HD media battle. Allow the user to purchase the movie through the Moviebeam service and burn it to whatever media they want.
Thank you! Finally some logic in this discussion.
People, there is already a tiered Internet with large content providers directly peering with ISP's! A smart VoIP company would put servers in strategic colos and directly peer with as many ISP's in the area. Is this unfair to other VoIP companies?
The idea that no one "owns" the net itself should be inviolate. I already am charged for the bandwidth that comes off my servers because of the cost incurred by my ISP for upstream bandwidth. ... and the big guys don't pay for all their bandwidth either. I'm surprised that no one on slashdot brings up peering. Yahoo apparently only pays for half of it's bandwidth. The other half of their bandwidth requirements flow over direct peering links to ISP's. Is this unfair? It saves the ISP money and the content provider money. Plus they get a short-cut -- lower latency, less hops. My gosh, that seems like an unfair advantage! Do you get free bandwidth for your servers?
Another thing is that I imagine that colo companies may pay for tiering and advertise that to their customers. This would allow any old blog to get special handling at a large colo.
It seems to me that very few people have actually thought more than two steps ahead on the economics of a tiered Internet. Personally, I would be interested to see how the marketplace would work out. I suspect it will not be like the FUD says it will be.
Last I checked FreeBSD's iSCSI target wasn't as mature as Linux's. I'll take another look. I did notice that FreeBSD had a scsi_target in 4.7 days, but I don't remember 4.7 having a nice, integrated, LVM like Linux did at the time.
I had not heard of Openfiler before. It looks pretty interesting. Differences from FreeNAS that I noticed are:
o Linux based
o iSCSI target and initiator (SAN) support
I've been using the "Enterprise iSCSI Target" for Linux for a while now and it works pretty good. I serve up LVM slices to a Windows 2000 Server without trouble. The combination of EIT and LVM provide a lot of high end SAN features.
With redards to SAN features, I'm really looking forward to a unification of SCSI target drivers on Linux (http://stgt.berlios.de/) so that Linux can serve up LVM block devices over fibre channel. This would make Linux a very good platform for a SAN operating system.
One more follow-up...
CALEA says:
(2) expeditiously isolating and enabling the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, to access call-identifying information that is reasonably available to the carrier--
What we all need to find out is what "other lawful authorization" is.
It doesn't really matter what telco you go to. They all fall under CALEA.
I do understand your fine point but one continues to have the right to demand that the phone company not sell your records or distribute your records to third parties and I have done that.
You missed the point. CPNI is not your data. It's the phone company's data. Your data is the contents of the call. There has been some change in the law with regards to this, but I don't know how much. It also, apparently, varies state to state.
CALEA might cover some of this stuff. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what provisions laws like CALEA allow for.
I hoping that gnuradio gets some more momentum. Think of all the possibilities! I think things could get very interesting with experimental digital modulation. I haven't played around much with gnuradio since I don't have a USRP. It seems to me that the software is a little hard to use. I keep my eye on the project hoping that things will continue to move along and get easier to use.
Once things move along it would be nice to have a portable gnuradio hardware that could interface to a PDA for HT uses.
Check out this link:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/cpni/
I think some of the confusion about this call record thing is that CPNI information is (used to be?) telco owned data. That means we (the customer) don't own the data. We only "own" the contents of the call. The page linked above talks about how telco's used to tell this data. You can't sell something you don't own. They did own it and they did sell it. There are newer laws that try to control the discloser of this information, but I'm not sure it's all been worked out yet. Maybe some one else around here has more information on this.
That's why CPNI data is treated differently than a phone tap. Even if the government gets this:
"call-identifying information effected within its switching premises can be activated only in accordance with a court order or other lawful authorization."
They have to go through further hoops to tap (listen in) a call. So far what has come out of the newspaper articles is that the NSA is tapping (getting contents) international calls. They've always had this capibility. They are also getting CNPI data from the phone companies. Two different things. Two different ways of handling the information.
Indeed, that would tend to hamstring those who have said that without "limited liability corporations" nothing would get done.
It also shows that big giant monopoly (evil?) companies are not all corporations. Evil is evil no matter what form it takes. Getting rid of corporations doesn't get rid of evil. On the other hand having corporations is a good thing. Corporations answer to their stock holders, not just to themselves. And anyone could make (or lose) some money off a corporation's stock.
I find that most people have no idea what limited liability is. It's pretty sad. People think it's some sort of stay out of jail card when it has nothing to do with that. Movies like "The Corporation" try to imply this is the case. It's shameful.
:)
Personally, I like reminding people that neither Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel were corporations. It kinda takes the wind out of people's sails.
I've always used SprintPCS for data. Pricing seems to be the most fair of any provider and they are always on the leading edge of high speed wireless.
From the SprintPCS site for their Power Vision phones:
Phone as Modem Capable
Use the included USB cable or Bluetooth Wireless technology to connect to a PC allowing Internet and email access.
It seems that SprintPCS is more open to everyone using their phones for Internet Access. A friend of mine purchased a Verizon phone and couldn't use the dialup feature without upping the per month pricing significantly (at least $59.99 versus Sprint's $39.99 unlimited plan). Even on my older SprintPCS phone I never had problems using at as a modem.
The Bitpim project works to provide syncronization with all BREW based phones via Bluetooth or USB cable. Bitpim supports more sync features on some phone models than others. For Windows, there is commercial full sync software for pretty much any BREW phone.
Initially Verizon had better and higher speed coverage than SprintPCS, but it appears that SprintPCS has overtaking them. According to the April 24, 2006 Infoworld, it states that Sprint's coverage is 219 major metro markets and 470 airports. It lists Verizon's coverage at 180 major metro areas.
The firmware was great on the Archos Jukebox players. The version I tried on my Nano worked basically the same way as the Archos Jukebox Rockbox firmware, but that was the problem. Apple's interface on the iPod is really, really, really well done. It's nice that Rockbox provides support for more codecs, but if they want people to use it on an iPod they need to make some major interface adjustments. Rockbox seemed very clunky compaired to the native interface. The fonts stink compared to the native firmware.
I hope that they make more headway, but for now, I'm sticking with the native firmware.
I do wish that Apple supported Ogg. I don't really care about mp3's anymore. Ogg and MP4 are the future. They are proper media containers and mp3 files are not. Since iPods support MP4, I rip to MP4 these days.
Sure you can. If you put 'linux reiserfs' or 'linux xfs' on the boot prompt, it will later present you with those options during the partitioning. It's been that way for a while, at least since FC1. Unless they've removed it for some reason, it should still have that feature in FC5.
Reiserfs is discouraged nowadays. I think it's because of lack of support for certain things like quotas, ACL's, and SELinux tags.
4. No ReiserFS
/lib/modules/2.6.15-1.2054_FC5/kernel/fs/reiserfs/ reiserfs.ko
Oh really?
It looks like it's there to me. You can easily install FC to reiserfs by putting reiserfs (or XFS) at the boot prompt.
Isn't NTFS support a little shaky still? I know reading works pretty good, but writting is still incomplete.