Well-maintained power grid can have transmission loss of around 4% as in the case of South Korea and Japan.
I think this is a practical limit as far as conventional conductors go. Unless the superconductors are ridiculously cost-effective to install and maintain, the benefits will never materialize - i.e. become a game changer.
To put this into perspective, let's try this. A relatively small country like South Korea still has more than ten thousand miles of transmission lines. Say you replace all that and achieve 4% more power.
Since the installed power capacity is around 70GW, that means about 3GW, or about three regular nuclear plants. I highly doubt completely redoing the existing transmission infrastructure with conventional means is possible with the cost of building three nuclear plants, let alone a superconducting one. And I haven't even got to the current limits yet.
This is why, if there's a superconductor breakthrough, I think it'll have more impact on medical uses rather than raw power transmission.
Disclaimer: I work in the electric power industry.
Actually, the US government has defined the imperial units as a converted value of metric units ever since the Mendenhall Order back in 1893.
In other words, the imperial values are pegged to the metric definition. The conversion values are not for "acceptable use" - they are the very definition.
NIST is where one of the copies of the standard kilogram is kept. NIST prefers SI standards.
Office of Weights and Measures "ensures traceability of state weights and measures standards to the SI", so while there may be "standard pound" of sorts, it's measured back to SI standard (kg) to keep them in check.
I also own an Eye-Fi card that is installed inside a DSLR. I have it paired with my iPhone, and it sends a photo I take with the camera to the phone about 5 seconds after it is taken. I do agree that it is tad slow, but this direct camera-phone connection is pretty useful for me. It has effectively made my DSLR an iPhone accessory, so to speak, and I am able to upload high quality photos to Internet almost immediately.
Incidentally, I have never had any need for the card's ability to do automatic uploading on its own, whether to a computer or a social network because it was slow and redundant. It only acts as a direct-access path for my phone to the camera's photos.
The article seems to imply that the carrier should have adopted US LTE frequencies.
The problem is, the North American LTE frequencies are quite different from the rest of the world. You have to expect that any NA-bound LTE devices wouldn't work on Europe or any other place.
Here's a basic rundown of the major frequencies in use:
North America: band 2 (1900MHz), band 4 (1700/2100MHz), bands 12/13/17 (700MHz)
Europe/Asia/etc.: band 3 (1800MHz), bands 5/20 (800MHz), band 7 (2.6GHz)
Because of this, even the current LTE chips with multiple frequency support has to choose between North American and European baseband firmware, necessitating separate models for NA and Europe release.
In terms of number of carriers behind each frequencies, 1.8GHz is the second most preferred after 2.6GHz. So I think it was sensible for the UK carrier to get behind it.
Personally, I'm waiting to see if there will be an LTE iPhone with non-US LTE frequency support. If this happens, device provision issue should lessen, as it is a popular phone - there will be a lot of demand and the competitors will release models with similar frequency support to prevent losing market share.
How is the RRN meant to be a unique number that only you know, if it is used at most websites? This sounds like the sillyness of the US SSN -- its "secret" but everyone asks for it. I can see why Australia made it illegal for anyone other than the Tax Office, Employers or Superannuation funds to ask for your tax file number.
Unique number identifiers are useful to ensure records don't get mixed up, but they are not a proof of identity. Using them as proof is moronic.
Yes, it's crazy, but that's what's been happening for so long in Korea. When you register for a Korean website to create an ID, you almost always must enter your name and RRN, and it's checked with a third-party identification service that makes sure the information is legitimate (i.e. name matches recorded RRN), and that the RRN is not already associated with an existing ID. If you've passed this, the website regards that, pretty much legally, that the person registering for the site is the person with that RRN. Of course, you can masquerade as someone else by just knowing the name and RRN and make an ID on a website that the actual person has not yet bothered to register. It's true and it happens pretty often. If you do get caught doing this, you'll be liable for jail time and hefty fine, but what if this is done by some Chinese dude from mainland China, as it is often the case? Not much you can do, except send some paperwork to the company running the website and reclaim or suspend the ID in question.
The even damning aspect of the RRN leak from the SK Comm hacking is that RRN itself is permanent, with no possibility of re-issue (with possible exception of getting a sex change, because part of the number identifies your gender). At least most US websites don't ask for your SSN. At Korean websites, if you're a foreigner, you might simply be blocked off from registering, or at least ask you to provide Foreign Resident Registration Number that's analogous to RRN. Handful of websites let you go through without this. It's a very sad situation.
When quoting about this SK Comm hacking incident, it should be noted that the "35 million users" is quite significant. There are approximately 39 million total internet users in South Korea with 48 million total population. This means nearly 90% of all S. Korean internet users' information was compromised. That, or more than 70% of total population. It's suffice to say the incident practically threw all relevant Korean people's key personal information out in the wild.
Oh, and by key personal information, I'm referring to Resident Registration Numbers that were part of the leaked info. RRN is a unique, non-transferable, non-modifiable serial number given to every Korean citizen, and thus is used as a highly convenient way of identifying the person in question. You can retrieve someone's website registration ID just by knowing the name and RRN, so it's something you yourself are only supposed to know. Since password hashes were also leaked, and since lots of folks reuse same password over and over, it would be relatively easy to pick out someone out of the leaked database and use the information to login to other websites, and by doing so, get even more personal information out.
Now the Korean websites are "encouraged" more than ever to use alternative means to identify someone, but I fear the cat's already out of the bag.
I'm guessing you wanted to say that there's no native WRITE support for NTFS on Macs. Read support has been there since 10.4, IIRC. 10.6 has undocumented write support, but it's not enabled by default probably because the implementation wasn't stable enough. I tested this feature and blogged about it back when 10.6 was just coming out. Google it and you can find how-to's relating to this.
Obviously, novice users will see that they can plug in the NTFS-formatted drives from Windows and see the files, but not copy anything to it. I'm not sure how often this scenario would come up, though. In my experience, you'd deal with FAT32 far more often and that is fully supported by OS X out of the box.
In any case, once the user finds out the limitation, he/she can google and easily find that there's both a free (NTFS-3G) and paid (Paragon NTFS) way of getting write support. They've been out for quite some time and got polished, so it's not much of a hassle, either.
What the grandparent probably meant by 'stay afloat' is maintaining altitude for a considerate amount of time. SSO and X-15 reached the 100km point, but had to come down relatively quickly because, once fuel runs out, you just fall to the gravity well.
If you're in the atmosphere, you can glide without using all that much fuel. You can't do that in space - certainly not at 100km altitude. In order to 'stay afloat', you need to do orbital velocity.
Of course, since it's not like atmosphere abruptly ends somewhere, the 'where to draw the line' can be a bit arbitrary, but the currently chosen one isn't impractical.
When you think about, TV is probably the most effective birth control device known to man... all the countries with high per-capita television ownership also have low birth rates.
Maybe. Going by that reasoning, internet may be even more potent birth control device. Korea has one of the lowest birth rates and the internet penetration rate is one of the highest.
I've contacted [any telco anywhere in the world] about the poor state of my line, and they basically ignore me.
There, fixed that for you.
Not really, no.
In Korea, there's a healthy, if a bit overheated, competition between the broadband ISPs. A complaint about the line speed guarantees that the company will promptly check for the problem and resolve the situation, lest the customer jumps to the other company for internet connection.
I've had my line problem solved overnight most of the time. And I usually call them up at night. If the problem doesn't seem to be fixable, the companies have sometimes resorted to freely boosting the connection speed (so the speed might go 'into' acceptable range somehow) or giving me a permanent discount on the monthly fee.
I'm pretty sure the title of "Wi-Fi Point Capital" would be given to some other city if the survey was extended to other cities.
I'm actually thinking of Seoul. South Korea's KT (formerly Korea Telecom) has a well-known Wi-Fi service that covers 'nationwide' called Nespot. According to this article, there were 27,000 Nespot APs back in early 2007. The figure was around 17,000 in 2006 according to this (in Korean), so the number's been growing pretty fast.
Now, while this number is 'nationwide', the coverage is concentrated on major metropolitan cities only. Considering that Seoul has 1/4 the population of the entire nation (1/2 if you cover its satellite cities), there should be around 10,000 APs solely run by KT. Then there's the VoIP phone service that's made popular by LG Powercomm. It already has more than a million subscribers nationwide, and most of the phones are 'wireless' via Wi-Fi AP to communicate between the phone and the network. I can detect one of these APs from my house. These two companies alone probably put out several tens of thousands of APs in Seoul already. If you consider all other private and corporate APs that normally lurks around in buildings and apartments, the numbers would be mind-boggling.
Microsoft doesn't really understand the idea of 'open source'... It seems to believe that if the source is out in the open in a certain manner, so to speak, it's 'open source', and it believes there could be restrictions placed on top of it despite what the name implies.
Maybe they're thinking along the lines of the 'open door policy' that some managers use as a means of 'communication with employees'. I mean, it's 'open', after all... right? He might throw a chair at you, but you're welcome to step in?
There are 11 persons in both pictures, and since it's supposed to be a retake of the same people 30 years later, it completely baffled me as to why the first photo had 2 women, while the second one had 3.
I mean, like, "WTF? did someone have a sex change?"
Because HVDC (High-Voltage Direct Current) method is the only viable way of transmitting electricity for distances over 200km in length point-to-point due to capacitance and dielectric issues in AC transmission. One of the major reasons it's not deployed 'unless needed' is because of the cost - AC is 'sufficiently good enough' for short to medium distances.
I do agree that the converters aren't effective investment these days, but I can get the converters in Korea for around 15 bucks. You should try some price-compare websites like Danawa or Enuri.
I personally bought the opposite kind to get my SATA drive to work on an external enclosure using PATA interface, and the price for this was around 15 bucks as well. This was a good investment in the sense that the enclosures sold these days even now mostly use PATA and the ones compatible with SATA are far and few in between, not to mention expensive.
Then South Korea is already pretty much at 99% - nationwide HSDPA networks have been fully deployed SEPARATELY by two carriers (yeah, it's an overinvestment) last March (KTF) and last May (SKT). If you have a capable handset, you'll get 3.6Mbit service from pretty much anywhere in the country. I've surfed internet from top of the mountains this way for a while.
...that it's a Java application. Sun is pushing for a non-Java, non-X11 native solution. I like NeoOffice as well and it has replaced Office 2004 for quite some time for me, but it would be nice to get the Java part out of the mix.
liters per 100km is like 'gallons for 100 miles', not 'miles per gallon'. The figures are inversed. Curious how Australians use that.
In Korea we use kilometers per liter (km/l). Middle-sized sedans get somewhere around 10 to 12km/l while the compacts go from anywhere between 18 and 25km/l. Luxury stuff gets about 6 to 8. Google tells me 25km/l = 58.8mpg.
100mpg should be 42.5km/l.
Ah, whodathunkit?:P Anyway, I have an itchy feeling some cracker might be able to put out a valid serial generator before MS could fix this problem.
ffmpeg's WMV9 implementation
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Since it's using ffmpeg to decode WMV9 instead of using Windows DLLs, both PPC and Intel Macs enjoy native decoding of the codec in question. No wrapper, no drag.
Incidentally, it looks like the new version is finally available in Universal Binary as well as Intel- and PPC-specific builds. And it seems to load subtitle texts automatically from the get-go without mingling with the preferences settings (yes, I confirmed this by trashing the existing preferences file). I say job well done for the VLC developers.
The list of unapproved money exchanges includes a lot of services including Western Union, so the hue and cry about antitrust and "eBay only allows their own stuff" is nothing more than a bunch of smoke without a fire. eBay specifically states that any "new" service without a track record of privacy protection and customer service will be scrutinized and most likely prohibited until it has some history.
But... I thought Western Union predates eBay, like... a century or something? They're hardly new...
Also, Marty in 1955 was able to get that message from Doc in 1885 via WU and I'm guessing that's a pretty good customer service (location and time of delivery observed as requested), and probably privacy protection, if that dude delivering it didn't open the letter...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Analog TV broadcast service in SK shut down completely on December 2012. It's now fully digital, using ATSC signal compatible with USA.
Therefore there is no way that the tablet in question will be able to pick up any SK TV broadcast even if it was not restricted.
Well-maintained power grid can have transmission loss of around 4% as in the case of South Korea and Japan.
I think this is a practical limit as far as conventional conductors go. Unless the superconductors are ridiculously cost-effective to install and maintain, the benefits will never materialize - i.e. become a game changer.
To put this into perspective, let's try this. A relatively small country like South Korea still has more than ten thousand miles of transmission lines. Say you replace all that and achieve 4% more power.
Since the installed power capacity is around 70GW, that means about 3GW, or about three regular nuclear plants. I highly doubt completely redoing the existing transmission infrastructure with conventional means is possible with the cost of building three nuclear plants, let alone a superconducting one. And I haven't even got to the current limits yet.
This is why, if there's a superconductor breakthrough, I think it'll have more impact on medical uses rather than raw power transmission.
Disclaimer: I work in the electric power industry.
Actually, the US government has defined the imperial units as a converted value of metric units ever since the Mendenhall Order back in 1893.
In other words, the imperial values are pegged to the metric definition. The conversion values are not for "acceptable use" - they are the very definition.
NIST is where one of the copies of the standard kilogram is kept. NIST prefers SI standards.
http://www.nist.gov/pml/wmd/metric/metric-program.cfm
Office of Weights and Measures "ensures traceability of state weights and measures standards to the SI", so while there may be "standard pound" of sorts, it's measured back to SI standard (kg) to keep them in check.
http://www.nist.gov/pml/wmd/
I also own an Eye-Fi card that is installed inside a DSLR. I have it paired with my iPhone, and it sends a photo I take with the camera to the phone about 5 seconds after it is taken. I do agree that it is tad slow, but this direct camera-phone connection is pretty useful for me. It has effectively made my DSLR an iPhone accessory, so to speak, and I am able to upload high quality photos to Internet almost immediately.
Incidentally, I have never had any need for the card's ability to do automatic uploading on its own, whether to a computer or a social network because it was slow and redundant. It only acts as a direct-access path for my phone to the camera's photos.
The article seems to imply that the carrier should have adopted US LTE frequencies.
The problem is, the North American LTE frequencies are quite different from the rest of the world. You have to expect that any NA-bound LTE devices wouldn't work on Europe or any other place.
Here's a basic rundown of the major frequencies in use:
North America: band 2 (1900MHz), band 4 (1700/2100MHz), bands 12/13/17 (700MHz)
Europe/Asia/etc.: band 3 (1800MHz), bands 5/20 (800MHz), band 7 (2.6GHz)
Because of this, even the current LTE chips with multiple frequency support has to choose between North American and European baseband firmware, necessitating separate models for NA and Europe release.
In terms of number of carriers behind each frequencies, 1.8GHz is the second most preferred after 2.6GHz. So I think it was sensible for the UK carrier to get behind it.
Personally, I'm waiting to see if there will be an LTE iPhone with non-US LTE frequency support. If this happens, device provision issue should lessen, as it is a popular phone - there will be a lot of demand and the competitors will release models with similar frequency support to prevent losing market share.
How is the RRN meant to be a unique number that only you know, if it is used at most websites? This sounds like the sillyness of the US SSN -- its "secret" but everyone asks for it. I can see why Australia made it illegal for anyone other than the Tax Office, Employers or Superannuation funds to ask for your tax file number.
Unique number identifiers are useful to ensure records don't get mixed up, but they are not a proof of identity. Using them as proof is moronic.
Yes, it's crazy, but that's what's been happening for so long in Korea. When you register for a Korean website to create an ID, you almost always must enter your name and RRN, and it's checked with a third-party identification service that makes sure the information is legitimate (i.e. name matches recorded RRN), and that the RRN is not already associated with an existing ID. If you've passed this, the website regards that, pretty much legally, that the person registering for the site is the person with that RRN. Of course, you can masquerade as someone else by just knowing the name and RRN and make an ID on a website that the actual person has not yet bothered to register. It's true and it happens pretty often. If you do get caught doing this, you'll be liable for jail time and hefty fine, but what if this is done by some Chinese dude from mainland China, as it is often the case? Not much you can do, except send some paperwork to the company running the website and reclaim or suspend the ID in question.
The even damning aspect of the RRN leak from the SK Comm hacking is that RRN itself is permanent, with no possibility of re-issue (with possible exception of getting a sex change, because part of the number identifies your gender). At least most US websites don't ask for your SSN. At Korean websites, if you're a foreigner, you might simply be blocked off from registering, or at least ask you to provide Foreign Resident Registration Number that's analogous to RRN. Handful of websites let you go through without this. It's a very sad situation.
When quoting about this SK Comm hacking incident, it should be noted that the "35 million users" is quite significant. There are approximately 39 million total internet users in South Korea with 48 million total population. This means nearly 90% of all S. Korean internet users' information was compromised. That, or more than 70% of total population. It's suffice to say the incident practically threw all relevant Korean people's key personal information out in the wild.
Oh, and by key personal information, I'm referring to Resident Registration Numbers that were part of the leaked info. RRN is a unique, non-transferable, non-modifiable serial number given to every Korean citizen, and thus is used as a highly convenient way of identifying the person in question. You can retrieve someone's website registration ID just by knowing the name and RRN, so it's something you yourself are only supposed to know. Since password hashes were also leaked, and since lots of folks reuse same password over and over, it would be relatively easy to pick out someone out of the leaked database and use the information to login to other websites, and by doing so, get even more personal information out.
Now the Korean websites are "encouraged" more than ever to use alternative means to identify someone, but I fear the cat's already out of the bag.
I'm guessing you wanted to say that there's no native WRITE support for NTFS on Macs. Read support has been there since 10.4, IIRC. 10.6 has undocumented write support, but it's not enabled by default probably because the implementation wasn't stable enough. I tested this feature and blogged about it back when 10.6 was just coming out. Google it and you can find how-to's relating to this.
Obviously, novice users will see that they can plug in the NTFS-formatted drives from Windows and see the files, but not copy anything to it. I'm not sure how often this scenario would come up, though. In my experience, you'd deal with FAT32 far more often and that is fully supported by OS X out of the box.
In any case, once the user finds out the limitation, he/she can google and easily find that there's both a free (NTFS-3G) and paid (Paragon NTFS) way of getting write support. They've been out for quite some time and got polished, so it's not much of a hassle, either.
What the grandparent probably meant by 'stay afloat' is maintaining altitude for a considerate amount of time. SSO and X-15 reached the 100km point, but had to come down relatively quickly because, once fuel runs out, you just fall to the gravity well.
If you're in the atmosphere, you can glide without using all that much fuel. You can't do that in space - certainly not at 100km altitude. In order to 'stay afloat', you need to do orbital velocity.
Of course, since it's not like atmosphere abruptly ends somewhere, the 'where to draw the line' can be a bit arbitrary, but the currently chosen one isn't impractical.
When you think about, TV is probably the most effective birth control device known to man... all the countries with high per-capita television ownership also have low birth rates.
Maybe. Going by that reasoning, internet may be even more potent birth control device. Korea has one of the lowest birth rates and the internet penetration rate is one of the highest.
Mash
up with
plus a little hacking and amaze your friends and family as you wander along the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Or, stun your relatives as you climb up Olympus Mons or walk along with Opportunity rover. I know I would.
I've contacted [any telco anywhere in the world] about the poor state of my line, and they basically ignore me.
There, fixed that for you.
Not really, no.
In Korea, there's a healthy, if a bit overheated, competition between the broadband ISPs. A complaint about the line speed guarantees that the company will promptly check for the problem and resolve the situation, lest the customer jumps to the other company for internet connection.
I've had my line problem solved overnight most of the time. And I usually call them up at night. If the problem doesn't seem to be fixable, the companies have sometimes resorted to freely boosting the connection speed (so the speed might go 'into' acceptable range somehow) or giving me a permanent discount on the monthly fee.
I'm pretty sure the title of "Wi-Fi Point Capital" would be given to some other city if the survey was extended to other cities.
I'm actually thinking of Seoul. South Korea's KT (formerly Korea Telecom) has a well-known Wi-Fi service that covers 'nationwide' called Nespot. According to this article, there were 27,000 Nespot APs back in early 2007. The figure was around 17,000 in 2006 according to this (in Korean), so the number's been growing pretty fast.
Now, while this number is 'nationwide', the coverage is concentrated on major metropolitan cities only. Considering that Seoul has 1/4 the population of the entire nation (1/2 if you cover its satellite cities), there should be around 10,000 APs solely run by KT. Then there's the VoIP phone service that's made popular by LG Powercomm. It already has more than a million subscribers nationwide, and most of the phones are 'wireless' via Wi-Fi AP to communicate between the phone and the network. I can detect one of these APs from my house. These two companies alone probably put out several tens of thousands of APs in Seoul already. If you consider all other private and corporate APs that normally lurks around in buildings and apartments, the numbers would be mind-boggling.
Microsoft doesn't really understand the idea of 'open source'... It seems to believe that if the source is out in the open in a certain manner, so to speak, it's 'open source', and it believes there could be restrictions placed on top of it despite what the name implies.
Maybe they're thinking along the lines of the 'open door policy' that some managers use as a means of 'communication with employees'. I mean, it's 'open', after all... right? He might throw a chair at you, but you're welcome to step in?
There are 11 persons in both pictures, and since it's supposed to be a retake of the same people 30 years later, it completely baffled me as to why the first photo had 2 women, while the second one had 3.
I mean, like, "WTF? did someone have a sex change?"
Then I read the article and went, "OOH."
Because HVDC (High-Voltage Direct Current) method is the only viable way of transmitting electricity for distances over 200km in length point-to-point due to capacitance and dielectric issues in AC transmission. One of the major reasons it's not deployed 'unless needed' is because of the cost - AC is 'sufficiently good enough' for short to medium distances.
Wrong country, dude... the one you're looking for is a bit more to the east.
I do agree that the converters aren't effective investment these days, but I can get the converters in Korea for around 15 bucks. You should try some price-compare websites like Danawa or Enuri.
I personally bought the opposite kind to get my SATA drive to work on an external enclosure using PATA interface, and the price for this was around 15 bucks as well. This was a good investment in the sense that the enclosures sold these days even now mostly use PATA and the ones compatible with SATA are far and few in between, not to mention expensive.
the craft's name was 'Humpty Dumpty'?
Then South Korea is already pretty much at 99% - nationwide HSDPA networks have been fully deployed SEPARATELY by two carriers (yeah, it's an overinvestment) last March (KTF) and last May (SKT). If you have a capable handset, you'll get 3.6Mbit service from pretty much anywhere in the country. I've surfed internet from top of the mountains this way for a while.
...that it's a Java application. Sun is pushing for a non-Java, non-X11 native solution. I like NeoOffice as well and it has replaced Office 2004 for quite some time for me, but it would be nice to get the Java part out of the mix.
liters per 100km is like 'gallons for 100 miles', not 'miles per gallon'. The figures are inversed. Curious how Australians use that. In Korea we use kilometers per liter (km/l). Middle-sized sedans get somewhere around 10 to 12km/l while the compacts go from anywhere between 18 and 25km/l. Luxury stuff gets about 6 to 8. Google tells me 25km/l = 58.8mpg. 100mpg should be 42.5km/l.
Ah, whodathunkit? :P Anyway, I have an itchy feeling some cracker might be able to put out a valid serial generator before MS could fix this problem.
Since it's using ffmpeg to decode WMV9 instead of using Windows DLLs, both PPC and Intel Macs enjoy native decoding of the codec in question. No wrapper, no drag.
Incidentally, it looks like the new version is finally available in Universal Binary as well as Intel- and PPC-specific builds. And it seems to load subtitle texts automatically from the get-go without mingling with the preferences settings (yes, I confirmed this by trashing the existing preferences file). I say job well done for the VLC developers.
Also, Marty in 1955 was able to get that message from Doc in 1885 via WU and I'm guessing that's a pretty good customer service (location and time of delivery observed as requested), and probably privacy protection, if that dude delivering it didn't open the letter...