Posts by Christian Berger 4851 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
The UK doesn't have widespread ISDN anymore as far as I've heard. (some article here recently mentioned that the author couldn't get ISDN)
Now if you need to dial the area code with every number, won't that keep up valuable resources in the switches? I mean every digit is about half a second on analog dialling. So with a zero plus 4 digits, the part decoding the numbers will be, on average, 3 seconds longer in use. Phone operators might need to buy new equipment. (It's less of a problem with ISDN as it's digital and everything can be done with computers instead of electromechanical systems)
Seriously, there are systems like in the US where you have fixed number lengths. In Germany on the other hand, you can have numbers of different length. For example I company I've once seen had the number 3, a branch of Siemens once had 7. Someone in our vilage had a 4 digit phone number while we had a 5 digit and I have a 6 digit one.
Actually there's one funny fact in the German phone systems. As you might know, after the separation of east Germany, it was clear that the re-unification was imminent. That's why the 09... area codes were set aside for East Germany. The codes were regional and were based on the routing structure. However in the 1970s nobody believed in the re-unification anymore. That'S why the 09... area codes were re-assigned to northern Bavaria.
After the reunification they had no normal area codes left. However by then the Network was largely digital and they could just assign part of the Berlin area code to those new areas.
1. It uses a PC which is plugged into that "secure virtual terminal" which can easily be compromised. (easy in todays world)
2. The physical security might be compromised by a skilful attacker being able to continue to power the device while dismantling it. (possible, but hard)
Back in the olden days, my Windows System booted up from DOS to Windows in 2 seconds.
Then most linux-based X-Servers boot up in that timeframe, even when running on a Pentium 90.
The big problem is that this time doesn't reflect the true boot time. Those 8 seconds won't give you the services you usually need, like an SQL-Server or a webserver.
There have been studies trying to find a correlation between economic predictions of growth and the actual growth. They haven't been able to find any significant correlation.
So I guess we should take this "expert" just as serious as all "experts" in that field and just ignore it. Economy is no science, it's just guesswork.
Now if they only start parsing a form of an already existing legacy Windows application and present it in a re-arranged version on a mobile device. If I was Microsoft, this would be an area I'd put a lot of research into.
People don't buy Windows licenses because of the features. They buy them to run old legacy software.
@Charles Manning: A car is a dangerous object, you can actually hurt someone badly with a car. You cannot do as much with an internet connection.
Also in Germany pre-paid providers are forced to record an address. However they are not forced to check it. So budget providers don't do so.
Of course there will always be people who buy Macs because of their software. Even so frankly MacOSX hasn't lived up to its expectations yet.
However the big no-no for any professional user is hardware reliability. Apple's entry level products are, unfortunately, far less reliable than business level products of other companies. OK, to be fair you can get a Mac-Mini from Apple for less than the price of a Windows licence.
As for mobile devices it doesn't seem to be much different. There are reports of iPhones breaking when falling down!
Clamp on meters are fairly useless on domestic lines as the power factor can vary a great deal.
Plus there's a much bigger problem. The device doesn't seem to have any usable interface. There's a GUI application which looks like it was made by and for idiots. One useful application would be to find out when certain appliances have finished. You can find that out via the power consumption. However since you cannot interface yourself with the device, there is no chance to do anything with the data.
And this is what this seems to be. Just because sales for EMI didn't rise when they ditched DRM doesn't mean DRM isn't bad for business. Example isn't correlation, and correlation isn't causality.
There are many counter-examples, at least equally valid:
For example look at the early modern German book market as compared to the British one. In Germany there was no strong Copyright, so books could easily be copied. This lead to many people learning to read, and books becoming cheap. This also caused a lot more books to be published and more money for the writers. As opposed to Britain where only the publishers got rich.
Also it's missing one point completely. The cat is out of the box. We do have uncensored high speed data networks. People are going to "illegally" get what they want. So what now should be done is finding ways to deal with it. Just like the industry found ways to deal with automatic pianos, the radio or even Youtube.
People usually don't pirate in order to save money. They pirate because they cannot get a paid copy. Many movies will probably never come out on DVD, for example ET (1982, not the 2002 version which is horrible and currently the only available version). Some people cannot afford to pay $20 for a DVD. Also I'm sure many pirates would lovingly give twice of what the artists get from buying the content directly to the artists, but there simply is a fairly useless industry in between.
I mean we are slowly getting towards the stage, when some subversive mobile operator can operate out of a non-suspicious backpack.
Alternatively, many mobile phones have wifi on. It should be possible to build a meshed network.
The main problem which is holding that back is that current social networks are highly centralized. There's no need to cut off the internet, when you can just send a police squad into the data-centers and confiscate the servers.
So what would now be important would be a social network which actually runs on your own devices, not some cloud somewhere.
"Surely the cinema has higher resolution than BluRay, this smells like total marketing twaddle to me."
Well actually this is only part of the truth. While film can provide resolutions higher than BluRay, there's much more generation loss. Essentially the modulation transfer function of film goes down very shallowly. So there's a large area of space frequency where details just loose their contrast. Since there is no easy way to boost those high frequency regions, there's much loss.
Anyhow, the second film was shot on NTSC video anyhow, so there shouldn't be much advantage for BluRay.
I mean there's software out there which, when you log in, it sends your login through an unencrypted TCP connection to a server. And if it's correct, it sends you back the administrator password for the MS-SQL server.
There's software storing _settings_ in SQL-servers! There's software which creates SQL statements by string concatenation so you can do SQL-injection.
There are operating systems out there which have network printer sharing functionality, which enables you to "print to file" on a remote system.
I believe we should allow programmers to be punched in the face for every security critical bug they create.
It's like a mail company complaining that Amazon ships though them, but they make all the profit.
Wake up operators. You are supposed to move bits around. That's what I'm paying you for. If your prices are reasonable (not nessesarily cheap) and your service is good (= no fiddling with the data!) you will get your money.
For example I'm not at the cheapest ISP, it's a bit cheaper than the local "BT" equivalent, yet it doesn't ever complain about there being the Internet. They just move bits. If their network should ever get congested (never happened in my area so far) they just spend the few extra quid to upgrade it. It's not like backbones cost anything these days.
Actually, most one way mirrors work considerably different. They just are mirrors with a bit of transmission going on. So essentially they are slightly transparent mirrors. If the other side is much darker than the side you are on, they look the same as normal mirrors. However if you had a high dynamic range camera and would simply substract the much brighter reflection, you'd see through the mirror to the other side.
We had that in Germany, but unfortunately our companies got overtaken by beancounters just before it got into production. (Beancounters dislike innovation because products which haven't been available before, haven't sold before, and therefore won't sell in the future)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID0JlT_3HY8
There are precise rules on how to ground your antenna mast. Please follow them. This is not your average "ohh my NIC is fried" situation, but more likely a "ohh my house is fried" one.
Other than that, I have used VoIP over a wireless connection while studying. It was terribly unreliable. Faxes hardly ever worked. Oh I'm glad I now have my own ISDN.
Well that's perhaps a bit exaggerated. However with n receivers and n transmitters you can have n transmissions independent of each other. It's called space multiplex.
Or if you want to look at it in a different way. The channel capacity is given by the signal to noise ratio. Noise is, on a good system, only thermal noise which is only dependent on the temperature (and bandwidth). Now if you have n antennas, the signal rises with n^2 since it's correlated while the noise power only rises by a factor of n. So your SNR gets better by a factor of n, therefore you can transmit more data.
You can obviously use the estimations of the impulse response of your channels to do a quite good estimation of the position of the transmitter.
This can also be used to provide position dependent services for the user of that transmitter.
And if you know the position of the transmitter you can also optimize the downlink for that position and improve throughput there, too. For example by delaying or de-convolulating the individual signals to cause constructive or destructive interference at certain points in an n-dimensional space.
There, just destroyed a few follow up patents. We really need an archive for obvious ideas to prevent obvious patents.
Essentially it's something which became obvious with the first "modern" analog cellphone systems in the 1970s. There you had multiple receivers to receive the signal from the mobile station, the network would then always use the strongest signal. This is also called diversity reception, in this case even macro-diversity.
From that point on you can go a step further and combine the signal of multiple antennas by means of beam forming. This is also known for decades and in fact when we discussed UMTS at university, the professor told us that those base stations were already in development. The next obvious step is to simplify the base stations to a point where you only have a simple transceiver and do all the beam forming and data processing centrally. This is something the UMTS network infrastructure was made to be turned into.
So it's obvious. Yes it works, but it obviously cannot do miracles. It's a sane idea to do, and I'm sure it would have been implemented in UMTS independently of that patent troll here.
Seriously if you think about it, the only thing the US can do to regain economical importance is to make China fail. And what better way then making them repeat all the mistakes the US did. Once China is run by MBAs, they will start wasting their productivity and fail.
Actually that's moderately simple. You just need to have a considerably stronger signal than the official uplink station, or you need to use an empty transponder which is turned on.
It is regularly done with UHF Satcom satellites of the US military. On the downlink frequency of 255.55 MHz you will often find satellite pirates.
On events hosted by the CCC there regularly is a home grown GSM network.
http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/GSM
You can either do that with a GSM station you bought from eBay (heavy) or use an USRP. (Though I doubt the second will work without external clock)
Back in the analogue days, you could convince someone your VHS deck was marginally better than someone elses deck to defend your higher price. And in deed you can make better or worse VHS decks.
Now with digital media, perfect reproduction is easily obtained. Especially with digital outputs, your $10 Chinese DVD-Player will have precisely the same picture as your $500 Japanese one. Ideally Sony should have gone for the sensible route and should have made more versatile players, for example DVD-Players which can rip to harddisks and integrate with your computer network or ethernet based video distribution based on open standards. Instead they went for the copyright police route, even prohibiting their DVD-Players from playing VCDs or MP3s. The rest is history.
As for camcorders, I don't see the loss. None of the formats was ever meant for long-time storage. You record, and perhaps edit on the cheap format, then transfer it to the format you use in your archive. After all with the hundreds of portable formats, you'll never know if you'll be able to get a working player next year.
Back in the 1960s-1970s, when video tape recorders were still considered to be to expensive and to hard to be used by laypeople, some German companies introduced the next thing to be. It was called "Bildplatte" (image record), and essentially a record spinning a lot faster with a lot finer groove, so you could store information on and scan it mechanically, just like a record player.
Just like GE, they used dead-end technology to solve a problem already solved by other technologies.
GE should have considered solving the existing problems of DVDs, like the problem that they aren't long term stable. A single layer DVD which lasts a lifetime and can be read by standard DVD-drives is far more useful than some specialized 500 gigabyte disk system where the disk probably costs more than a whole harddrive of the same size.
I mean that is the major security problem, and apples previous attempts, anarchy and dictatorship, didn't exactly do a lot to help.
Forced Apstores cause people to jailbreak their devices or force them to run software they don't want. Anarchy causes people to just install malware right away.
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