Posts by David Shaw 348 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2007
hasn't been mentioned for a while. There was a US lab where they managed to interstitially adsorb and store more hydrogen inside a metallic or graphite nanostructure lattice than as cryogenic liquid hydrogen. The lab blew up one day, unfortunately. Did I tell you that I met Stanley Pons, nice chap, mine's the furry arctic coat with the excess of neutrons...
when the LTE or WiMedia has (if/when) evolved to Cognitive Radio based on Software Radio technologies, then there will exist a set of local/metropolitan policies that will be inherited by devices from the Cognitive pilot channel or similar enforcement mechanism. As ALL devices will in future feature an SDR this Policy inheriting behaviour is needed to avoid unwanted emissions from the ever increasingly flexible hardware. M$ hasn't invented this, they're just talking about it?. Paris!
My colleagues here in Italy just brought the engineers over from Germanland to install their solar winter-DHW / summer-swimming pool heating system (and another team from Austria to install the screw fed wood pellet backup system) C4 Granddesigns seems to feature many roving tuetons?, so maybe it's not (yet) common in the UK, but theoretically possible. (For ballpark comparisons they also got a team from Germany to drive over 1000kms with an entire Lawn in rolls, rotavate, lay and water to perfection, for less than the cost of local Italian gardencentre quotes)
As for superinsulation, at work we've started screw/glueing full facade 80mm polystyrene tiles, later rendered, to the outside of most of our buildings. I also haven't found a way to do it on a domestic scale yet, but in theory this might be nice! (gvnmts wouldn't like the missing consumption VAT I suppose) you might be able to heat the whole superinsulated house with a single Pentium 4?
living in Italy , Europe's most power starved economy - no natural resources beyond a few wet alps, we each get maximum 3kW for our house. (You can pay a lot extra to get 4.5kW) My MCB in the power meter trips off after a few seconds of more than 3kW peak. *A home UPS is essential* , not to power the whole home, but to keep the small family infotainment server room going, ADSL WiFi Airdisk Apple TV etc. Having electronics connected directly to a wall socket, then losing 220V is a very unhappy experience for, in cost order of previous failures : Sony 17"LCD, Mac Mini HDD, LaCie 250GB external HDD, iMac DV. The UPS gives me a pleasant 15 minutes of beeping, time enough to reset the MCB or switch everything off safely if it is Enel's fault. (all eventually repaired except the Sony)
I see the need to cover my roof with PV, tenthousandpounds for a couple of kilowatts peak , with hopefully a 25 year lifetime if I use certified modules, I already have wood heating installed, with gas backup, I suppose I should go solar thermal for an extra 2 grand. Maybe I'll build the envirotard stuff instead of buying a new car?
Why , I ask myself, does Italy historically have hardly any investment in Solar , whilst it seems that every German village is covered in PV, plus many people I know in Germany have installed salt water under-garden thermal heat pumps. In Italy the 3kW available won't even drive the heat pump! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-coupled_heat_exchanger>
is there a reason why everyone with a house in the UK can't install 80 metres of 35mm tubes, or a few hundred PV tiles, microgeneration could certainly lighten the drain to Sizewell during the winter? Currently the UK, and most other neighbours of France are importing as much juice as is possible.
Of course, reading the expert prediction from EC DG Transport and Energy(2003) document : "European Energy and Transport Trends to 2030" says "Oil prices decline from their high 2000 levels over the next few years, but they then gradually increase to reach a level in 2030 no higher than that in 2000 (and 1990)" (Oil was an average of U$D 28 per barrel in 2000) <http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/energy_transport/figures/trends_2030/1_pref_en.pdf>
so that's allright then!, for my amusing quip at the end I should ponder where I can get a PV powered ökologischesalzwasseruntergartenthermischewärmepumpen?
this BECTA fuss might explain my surprise at discovering the latest M$ Office for Mac on sale at thirty-five pounds via a link on the OU website. The dvd arrived in minimal packing (a jiffy bag) and seems to work on a Macbook Pro just as slowly as Open Office does, high marks for compatibility there!
My kids are being taught ubuntu @ home and Windows @ school, we currently prefer Pages for creating stuff, and I suppose may drift in the direction of Google Apps eventually
oh, did I forget the OU link..? it ended-up at http://www.software4students.co.uk/
and I had to register with my daughter's school's name & postcode, then collected my 80% discount! I have , of course, no connection to M$ or the above 'real but dodgy priced ' software bunch, but I did notify the EC competition branch about how unhappy I was with OOXML
quote :
Date: 14 April 2008 16:06:07 GMT+02:00
From: Infocomp@ec.europa.eu
Dear David,
Thanks for your email. We can inform you that in the course of the ongoing investigation into the interoperability issues related to Microsoft's products the Commission made enquiries with the EU's and EFTA's national standardisation organisations about possible irregularities in the OOXML standardisation process.
You will understand that as this is an ongoing investigation on which the Commission has not yet drawn any conclusions we cannot comment any further.
Best regards,
Infocomp)
-----Original Message-----
From: David [mailto:xxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 12:22 AM
To: REDING Viviane (CAB-REDING); COMP INFO4;
well, at present it seems to do so in Italy, <http://www.ngi.it/eolo/bts.asp>
the root address at www.eolo.it (only in Italian, sorry) explains how you can get up to 12megs via an external 5GHz antenna. My friends use the 2 meg service and only complain that their 600 euros per year unlimited data contact has to be paid up-front when signing the contract. Of course this almost WiMax wouldn't be needed if T*l*com It*lia would actually deliver DSL to non-metropolitan customers.
in keeping with El'Reg's excellent technical hive knowledge I will reveal that the Eolo network uses about 8500 client Alvarion BreezeACCESS VL LOS/NLOS dishes with wideband OFDM at 5,4-5,7 GHz point to point to 62 usually mountain-top Motorola BTS with fibre connectivity at 10Gbit/s to the NGI backbone via Cisco 12410 routers with 4Gbit/s to the Internet. All allegedly independent of Telecom Italia.
for those who like Antenna Pr0n, try <http://www.ngi.it/eolo/fotogallery/images/bts_campodeifiori/3.JPG>
1.JPG, 2.JPG & 4.JPG for images of Italian pre-alps, lakes and yes, Antennas!
a friend drove from Calais to Italy in their diesel Fiat something-or-other at 40km/h with the engine management system screaming "safe-mode" at them! (the garages in EU were temporarily closed due to summer holidays or something)
the cause of the safe-mode was that the urea holding tank inside the diesel tank had run-out, this was refilled in Italy , as is usual during a routine service, and I'm not buying an ...insert name of wee containing vehicle... to have similar fun!
I've bought a couple of them, of course, I then have to select/configure like mad(*) to get rid of every access point, profile, link, bookmark, service that might accidentally start the 3G service. (*)Including changing model identity code, flashing firmware, updating and downgrading!
then you have a nice modern GSM/WiFi phone with a switched-off 3G, which I could optionally re-awake should someday I find A REASONABLE (CHEAP) EU WIDE ROAMING DATA TARIFF.
/Yes, mine's the flat 'cap; ee, tha's reet, ah'm from Yorkshire!
Scientific Technology Funding Crisis....... (again)
I remember when the UK blamed the dropping of projects on 'unforeseen movements in the value of the Swiss Franc' ...
Jodrell's a bit old ~(who isn't), so might make a few quid in scrap value, but I have friends who were hoping that the UK would do a bit more than just help design the forthcoming future International Linear Collider (31kilometres of vacuum and a bit of radiofrequency and magnets) <http://www.linearcollider.org>
some STFC background at <http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/33012> also note the 25% cut in University PP and astrofizz funding!.
We should lobby the Chancellor, not AD he'll be replaced soon enuff, but Ed Balls who's dad is actually a genuine CBE MA DPhil FIBiol, and thoroughly nice chap.
come to think of it, are there ANY MP's who aren't former journalists or lawyers and understand that a bit of mildly expensive blue-skies research might get you something useful later on...?
/global warming penguin icon to represent the inevitable carbon tax in the budget tomorrow!!
as I work at a sometimes european test centre for the US satellite digital audio radio service, I have been following with interest the activities of Delphi and Worldspace in europe.
“The satellite digital radio (SDR) standard that was approved by the technical committee of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in November 2006 is the core of the technology that Worldspace is implementing in its satellite radio communication networks in Europe,” the broadcaster said.
“It combines terrestrial repeaters and satellites and permits the most efficient use of the spectrum allocated for satellite radio (1479.5 to 1492MHz), thus maximizing digital capacity while maintaining excellent service quality, even in difficult reception environments such as urban city centers.”
There are currently 2 Worldspace satellites in orbit, with a third in a garage in Toulouse quote "launch of its mobile service beginning in Italy in 2009. It will use MPEG-4 accPLUS v.2 technology"
MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC Profile @ L2, Enhanced aacPlus?, anyway you can start here to dig out details <http://www.worldspace.com/maintenance/index.html>
Delphi receivers hope to offer 40-50 channels within the 12.5MHz bandwidth EU SDARS. Meanwhile DAB seem to be a working system in Switzerland, but RAI in Italy trialled for a couple of years and switched everything off, there are some commercial multiplexes, but DAB market penetration is Zero. I couldn't find a DAB signal in the south of France. In Italy FM reception is *so* bad, that it's unbelievable - hardly any working national chains, Radio Monte Carlo 1 and Virgin Radio being two of the only channels that automatically allow RDS synchronisation to work. Even they peter-out in the Apennines and require the usual manual tune once per kilometer. I look forward to EU SDARS, it's great what you can stuff-inside the shark's-fin on a BMW!....that'll be sat patch up. sat in-fill vert sideways, gps, gsm, 3g, tv etcetera....
well, the GSM network in an emergency can give millions of failed call attempts; the UK Access Overload Control (ACCOLC) of GSM is fine when 'the first responders' have the access keys. in 7/7 they didn't have, ACCOLC was ruled out by Gold command, but accidentally ruled in by a more local commander. GSM confusion! 3G was open and working OK all day long.
Runners were used to convey medical communications. Runners were used to convey Fire Brigade communications. Runners were used in Olympia @ 2000BC, so what's new!
The covert kit for Motorola is a bit of aquarium tubing that goes behind the ear, up the sleeve etcetera - on sale on eBay.
Whilst talking to the Spanish Ministry of Interior Program Directorate about their national emergency radio system SIRDEE , (considered possibly as an EU reference Model for an Integrated System) SIRDEE is TETRAPOL FDMA, the equipment is by EADS Telecom/MATRA, Telefonica owned infrastructure, the hands-on-control INDRA, the O&M Telefonica, operational use FF.CC.SS.EE also connected to FRONTEX/ Schengen for the South Border immigration Pressure. There are about 120K SIRDEE user organisations, 60 base networks to cover Spain, 54290 terminals in the 52 provinces with a QoS time availability of 95%. SIRDEE was conceived as a Voice+occasional data system (like TETRA) but hasrapidly evolved from
600 "voice queries per-day to a database-control-room in January 2005" to currently an
end-user (PC Plod) direct data query terminal function of over 11000 data queries per-day,
with now a 4 seconds response using SIRDEE network, for for example, FRONTEX related queries to the Schengen DB & the Delinquency Traffic DB. What this all means is that UK Airwave TETRA was imposed, and has shit data rate but may get better when it is paid for, or use GPRS/Crackberry. SIRDEE was competitively chosen , has lower O&M/terminal costs for a bigger area, and delivers better data on the beat, and this extra data capacity is being heavily used , especially for anti-trafficking
/mines the Sombrero , Paris isn't in Spain
actually the Machine Operators (who do extensive shift-work) are the ones usually driving the sports cars. (It helps that with a 431K CERN number plate you can get a tax-free sports car!)
I have done machine experiments at 3am with <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Feodorovich_Orlov> Yuri didn't drive a sports car.
I prefer Ferney Voltaire to St.Genis-Pouilly (what will happen to the protons in November when the Swiss/EU border is dissolved??) (they currently have to pass the Douanes every 45microseconds!!)
/don't need a coat, the skyshine keeps me warm
@eugene
Vista will *NOT* be the next standard. (unless MS is paying for voting again)
Standards are open, such as the unified POSIX architecture - large Sun Workstations, the current Mac Mini et al running Leopard etcetera.
Vista is such a pile of absolute total f***king sh*t that I am banning it from my laboratory as a security risk, never mind the lack of useability, and s l o w.
I've mentioned before - and I'll say this again, I am a Microsoft Partner with hundreds of ISO images VLP of their products in my cupboard. Mosty excellent and creative pieces of software. The VLP ISO XP SP2 image is used nearly every-day, and all of our new shiny Vista ISO discs are left on the shelf, untouched, gathering dust, unloved and totally in need of recycling to make ashtrays or something.
'ELLO POLLY!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call!.....This Vista is no more! it has ceased to be! it's expired and gone to meet 'Steve Balmer! 'it's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'it to the OEM chain 'it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's metabolic DRM processes are certainly 'istory! it's off the twig! it's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off it's mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! VISTA IS AN EX-OS!!
"Heinrich Kieber, a 42-year-old former employee, stole data ... (from) ... LGT Treuhand AG..."
and is now believed to be in Australia
from the Wall Street Journal
(there was some comment on Radio France that the BND german secret police might have brought Heinrich under a witness protection program)
I have a couple of new Vista - I think they are 'Dull' XPS 2 x 2.20GHz Core2Duo laptops with 2GB ram each, came from Dell Canada, tax free, long story.
Nice shiny screen, very bright - after 5 minutes unuse the screen dims to 50%, and for a week I couldn't find how to make it bright again other than after a restart. the GUI is filled with hundreds of clickable things, most of which won't go away or do what I expect, it will NOT connect to my home 802.11n WPA Wifi using 802.11b/g compatibility, it will only try and connect to a neighbours WEP network, even when I put the Vista on top of the Wifi router. I went as far as loading the driver dvd for my Wifi. Still no connection. When I found an old 802.11g+ Wifi router and plugged in a subnet of my 802.11n then finally Vista connected. It popped up a screen, amongst many others, which mentioned that there might be problems with my Vista. of the 2 firewalls installed, both were off.
After reading the page several times I realised it might want me to do something, I downloaded a few KBxxxxxxx.exe which 'were necessary on my system', these ran and stated that 'your system does not need KBxxxxxxx', so all clear then!
And it is dog-slow. of the 2GB ram, I was informed - running only a diagnostic program that 750MB is free. Ubuntu would do the h/w justice!!! Vista Personal Ultimate is ME2. Where's the ice?
I bought Ashes to Ashes ep 1 and the complete series 1 of Life on Mars,
it is excellent quality, "near DVD" quality when viewed on a 20" iMac at work.
The actual format of Ashes to Ashes is .m4v which is Raw MPEG-4 Visual bitstream. It is DRM'ed, with a fairplay wrapper around the video , before I could play I had to authorise my iTunes and I was advised that I am only allowed a total of 5 PC/Mac's with this authorisation. I can however watch on any number of synchronised VidiPods, iPhones (my count is currently zero)The raw video dimensions are 640 x 360 (widescreen) hence slightly lower than DVD quality, but certainly watchable on the iMac and I'll try at home on the bigger flatpanel TV with iTunes running on XP/Media edition (cheap good upscaling silent vid card)
The BBC progs could be better and could be cheaper, it will need to be cheaper to get me to buy stuff other than the excellent stuff!
the audio is only in stereo, and filesize is 675 megabytes for 1 hour of video.
I think the AppleTV shows will be anamorphic hence better pixel fill, and rumour has it that apple is re-coding all their iTunes videos for anamorphism. (I have an AppleTV but haven't had the time to plug it in yet. on the whole I prefer to own rather than rent, but price could change that)
Quote: One of the big challenges facing Intel and AMD as they move to multi-core processors is a lack of software than can take advantage of the fancy chips.
"A couple of years ago, I had a discussion with Bill Gates (about the multi-core products)," Gelsinger said. "He was just in disbelief. He said, 'We can't write software to keep up with that.'"
Gates called for Intel to just keep making its chips faster. "No, Bill, it's not going to work that way," Gelsinger informed him.
The Intel executive then held his tongue. "I'm won't say anything derogatory about how they design their software, but . . . " Laughter all around. /Quote
Surely the divine evolution to Windows 7.2.3790 is going to allow for these new fangled dual-cores things that will be on sale around 2010? (mild sarcasm)
here at the Research Centre, we're an M$ partner and involved in M$ developer programme, hence FREE (well at the point of use) M$ software. We have cupboards 'groaning' with Latvian versions of Vista, French LaVista, German DasVista, even t'Vista in English - Seriously, in the last 9 months , ****not one single colleague has asked for any of the Vista install dvds*** , whilst the ISO XP image is used every week.
And, I've been buying shiny Apple toys , iMacs , Macbooks etcetera to dual boot in Fedora for our ongoing Communications Research tasks. Apple is back in teh Enterprise. The top managers are going MacBook Pro, I don't think they've seen the 'Air' adverts yet! I've bought the odd HP Xeon (with XP) for our serious coders, but the future doesn't look remotely exclusively Windows Seven.
and yes, I bought with my own money Windows ME for home use, years ago, hence the Duck icon
by stuffing a proton beam, OK quite a dense twenty-six gigaelectronvolt proton beam, onto a (cooled) 3mm diameter by 150mm long copper wire that had about *200*kilo*amps* flowing through it. Said wire dumped all sorts of junk out of the backend, some of which were Antimatter. A bit of filtering, magnetic meandering, concrete, boron and we had a beam of antiprotons. The team did this from 1981 onwards and got the Nobel Prize for physics in 1984 - but mostly for the clever faster than light beam antiproton beam densifier technology (Stochastic Cooling) which allowed the Antiproton Accumulator machine to feed the Super Proton Synchrotron and evince the W & Z intermediate vector bosons.
It was the Low Energy Antiproton Ring that first planned to decelerate an 3.5GeV/c pbar and see if, at rest , it floated UP or DOWN when acted upon by gravity. Hi Tim!
I last week bought the excellent Airport Extreme Giga Base Station (802.11n draft) for 230 swiss francs (£108) and added a generic 500GB USB2 Airdisk for 79 euros (£59) total £167, and Apple.com/uk wish me to buy the Time Capsule for £199?
that's not such a wildly different price from what I assembled, but to pay an extra £130 for another half-terabyte!!!, I could get my system up to 1TB for about £226 allowing me a whole hundred quid towards the flight to Boston to pick-up the new thin shiny toy.
one of the ideas was/is to design a cheap simple Terahertz emitter and embed absolutely ****kin' everywhere in city centre streets eg lamps, with the more costly Terahertz (Oh, go on then) "millimetre wave technology" coherent bistatic receivers at the focal points of interest. i.e. your local version of the Kabul Serena hotel. A good algorithm would then automatically scan people upon entry, looking for the glint of cold sky etcetera and perhaps deny access.
nobody's mentioned yet that as "millimetre wave technology" effectively strips away clothing from the receiver's point of view, not only is PH a perfect icon for this story, but the spin-off market for on-street viewing would be huge!, except maybe in ........ insert name of favourite town
by checking/sampling the blood antibodies over most of the continental US it has been shown that very many citizens have been exposed to WNF, luckily not showing symptoms, ie death. (thescientist Dec 2007)
Here in Europe, a village in Italy near Ravenna was in 2007 filled with large numbers of Tiger Mosquitos and quote from somewhere random: ... "chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region....Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics. The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland. "
/can I have the biowarfare coat over there with the insecticide bottle and the flyswatter, no not the blue one, the red one
...in Geneva when he came to DONATE a free Cray to our hole in the ground. I think it was the X-MP running UNIX. well it was entirely free - we just had to pay the million dollar annual maintenance contract! I asked Seymour for a job, but I wasn't quite American enough - he did mention that Gallium Arsenide was the future!
it still might be !
This xmas I bought PS2 Guitar Hero I in the nearby supermarket for €39. (£28)
This has a one piece (pretend) black guitar with a long USB lead, allegedly it is better than the GH3 two piece (pretend) white guitar which has connector issues between the head and the body, PLUS Wifi/wireless issues hence giving finger/note problems even when you hit the right fret note at the right time! I decided that wired was best.
Gameplay is OK on the PS2
when you put a GSM in a screened bag , or tin box, you *might* reduce the electromagnetic fields , except your mobile, feeling cut-off from its network will inevitably up its transmit power bursts to MAXIMUM in order to re-establish contact. (most UK GSM handhelds are Class 4 which give a peak of two watts RF output, the complex ETSI specified Power Ramp/Time/template gives 2dB steps down to a level of about 20milliwatts when the phone can easily see the basestation.)
Would you rather have a gentle warming 0.02 Watt of 900MHz or, alternatively and "better?" 2000 milliwatts having stuffed your Nokia in a "screened" bag?
there are loads of Wii's here too, I live on the Italo-Swiss border.
Problem is that the PAL Wii's are language limited, the Wii here in Italy is also switchable to Spanish and Portuguese, whilst the Swiss one is Italian, French and German. I thought that the UK Wii's were English , Spanish and French? maybe the NL or B or F sourced Wii's would have English as a option?? could make a day trip to Calais or Bruges fun again.
As for hard-2-find software, I was able to get High School Musical Wii singalong edition with Microphone here for sixty euros whilst amazon uk market-ripoffs want more than sixty quid for it! admittedly mine is PAL in english with italian second language and for some reason a splash start-up screen in Russian!!!??
in a minor role, many years ago. It was a lovely cost-plus contract for the GWS25 - "Guided Weapons System type 25". I was one of the 200+ technical apprentices who worked on Skolnik based systems. I enjoyed the days of calibrating the radars with a rented RAF fighter, or just using Solar noise (a few dawns in misty east anglian airfields) Then, rounds of defence cuts, overcomplex design requirements from the MOD (one of our radars would have SUNK the destroyer that it was to be mounted on!) , led to a situation with about 12 apprentices. The 188 remainders went on to good jobs, one guy started Amazon.co.uk, one became an accountant at ENRON, several joined spooky services, I left the country hardly to return again.
I did come back for one post-weinstock job interview for the old company. "We want you to manage the Test Department", they said. "What would be my responsibilities?," I said. "Oh, just select the 30% of staff to fire and do *more* testing" they said.
..sigh... I do know people still hacking in the UK defence industry - but I reckon I earn 4 times what they do, and I know I won't be randomly sacked in the next 20 years.
IT angle, er... well the radar development computers in the '70's had Dungeons and Dragons loaded! but we could only play at mid-day. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
that I attended postulated getting mobile devices to work on currently unfashionable nuclear isotope batteries. They offer about 50milliwatts of power over a decade recharge cycle. Need to improve the 'net protocols somewhat to make better use of the battery limitations , drop the inefficient TCP/IP and go for (DARPA suggested) RF DTN disruptive tolerant mesh networks, actually another study I've seen said that UMTS would work better and infrastucturally cost less had the dosh been invested in DTN mesh systems.
having spent a few years in Switzerland making the above, I concur that the "making noise after 10pm law" exists, or is believed to. It is because the Swiss are a hard-working nation and have to get up early for work, therefore go to bed early the night before, and don't wish to be disturbed in their apartment block by the sound of flushing loos etcetera. Same goes for the "it is forbidden to wash your car on a sunday" in front of the apartment block. I hesitate to mention the name of the mad austrian/german from the last century who allegedly founded these particular rules, as under Usenet discussion rules I would then have lost the argument!.
Switzerland remains a very nice place, pity it took me 6 months to get the last child's Swiss birth certificate due to their new voracious "Citizen total information national security database" the IT angle is that I *was* able to email the Swiss President for help, and I even got a personal reply from Mme. Micheline Calmy-Rey.
the home H2 generator does make some sense, when all previous tests of H2 powered cars have shown the embarrassing fact that your fuel leaks out in about 3 days! it's quite hard to seal hydrogen in a box!!, better to just fill-up , or top-up as you need it. On the Plug-in Hybrid idea, not too bad, just need the 330kilogramme (=79Jubs) thousand volt battery to be charged at 55Amps overnight. think car-jump leads on steroids and hope that your neighbors aren't busy manufacturing or leaking too much H2 as your PiHybrid system emits Drax-B type sparks when you plug it in. Also there's not enuff mains electricity available for everyone to plug in their Plug-in Hybrid. Bicycles do have a future!
thinking about MS & Gooogle & whoever trying to claim the ("actually about 95% unused" bits of the) natural RF spectrum brings me to mind a discussion that I heard in 2005.
( I took contemporaneous notes, now where are they....)
Ah yes, US Department of Defence, Office of the Secretary of Defense: Dr. Badri Younes, (Director) stated on Tuesday 7th June that
“We”, (The US Defense Department) ,“Claim the Spectrum, it is Ours, we will be Spectrum Dominant using the new technologies!”
Now, I took this as 'military speak', after all , most people might think that the 'natural RF Spectrum' belongs to , er, nature rather than a transient empire, but on further questioning it seems to have derived from *serious* US Industry lobbying, to the FCC, other regulators and to Congress. US Industry was trying to grab BIG chunks of the (really only 5% used) RF Spectrum. This backfired in a big way when the US Military got worried about WiFi nodes interference to their radars etcetera and got The Prez to gift the whole EM Spectrum to the DoD= primary user, everyone else secondary user - now negotiate about the crumbs!!
some more old stuff at http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3084475 (caution advert-ware)
but we'll get true cognitive radio at about the same time that the Web is Semantic. (they are tailor-made for each other!)(thanks Sir Tim!)
This MS White Space device is an early attempt at Cognitive Radio (CR=a device that understands its local and far environment/policies and can transmit totally un-noticed by other users) It is probably TOO early a system, perhaps in the attempt to grab valuable airspace. Some WiFi's are becoming 'a bit' cognitive, but not yet coming close to the DARPA model of beyond IP - Disruptive Tolerant Mesh Networked XG military systems.
you *can* transmit many bits per RF air symbol, think QAM which transmits approx ten channels in the space for a legacy channel, or OFDM which can have a thousand transmitted subcarriers with FFT and actually performs quite close to the Shannon limit at near the Nyquist rate.
We'll get Software Radio by 2010 and the specialised SDR true cognitive will fade-in by 2015, to handle the free VoIP services and the Pay-per-microsoecond services, /choose your own QoS!
@simon 12/10/2007 @ 05:30 GMT,
no the malware and cross-site-scripting extent is certainly beyond 'questionable' sites, it is a fact that many 'normal' sites continue to be hit/hacked to host malware.
1st Congressional district of Wisconsin Republican Part website, (iFrame/Storm)
A fake NFL results website (iFrame/Storm)
YouTube aggregate websites (iFrame/Storm)
malicious Javascript in some eBay sale offers, everything
any* site with banner adverts that has had the advert feed compromised
(yes, this includes El Reg' !) Trojan
and whatever malware will be invented tomorrow....
IE is a reasonable browser, with flaws that MS is working on - but personally I ONLY use IE for windows update purposes. I use Firefox with TOR with RefControl, with NoScript with Flash/Shockwave deleted from the system. (and most of my webpresence is on a Mac or *nix system too!)
think, even for home use, NSA type Multiple Independent levels of Safety/Security (MILS), anything else is OK , "if you're feeling lucky" (=You're certain that you have NO trojan - including maybe the stealth trojan that is almost totally inactive on your system, no slowdown , no IRC in the background - until it detects a bank account login - when it will keylog for a while , then slowly phone home)
of course this brings to mind the Aircraft Safety comment .....quote from some bog somewhere..."Can't remember who it was exactly, but some senior bod at Rolls-Royce was once asked what he thought defined a really safe aircraft. His reply was something to the effect: "If my co-pilot told me that an engine had failed...and I asked him which engine...and he said 'Number 29 sir'...and then I asked him 'Number 29 on which side?'..."
but it's YOUR bank account that could be microdebited in favour of far-away terrorism and YOUR IP that the police will be asking about the indecorous image webring.
as an ageing Telecomms engineer , now in a field in Italy, we used to strive for many 9's of POTS availability, typically four nines core network, 99.99% , with five nines 99.999% uptime on the well designed microwave LOS backbone systems.
now I'm told by recent escapees from the Cell Fone Industry that new GSM etcetera basestations have NO UPS systems installed, in order to save installation & maintenance costs. This will achieve a grade of service based upon the reliability of the local electrical grid, and the density of nearby BTS. vulnerability to SCNI DoS?, irrelevant?? entire BT system going TCP/IP VoIP - hence vulnerable to everything bad on the interweb, irrelevant?? I suppose we should all be happy with a "two nines" service nowadays??
I could go on, but I'm sure I left my coat around here somewhere
via HDMI with a Sony STR-DA1200ES 7.1 dolby amp with optical digital audio....
the 720p HD films are OK, except for the seemingly random delay between mouths opening and hearing the speech or vice-versa!
I realise that I'm using HDMI version 1.2 technology, but the end result is crap! and from what I understand about the auto-synch that may be possible with an HDMI (akkah-dee-emm-ee in Italian) V1.3 , it's that the status is "AUTOSYNCH MAY BE POSSIBLE" it's not actually guaranteed!
when I watch 720p .avi files torrented to my Mac Mini HTPC and DVI input to the TV, I get extremely good lip-synch.
it really does confirm that the hdcp/hdmi/hdtv isn't actually a mature and useable technology yet, god help us when we're supposed to pay for and watch 1080 program material. 'Research' says that 50% of TV viewers don't overtly notice the a/v delay , so half the population won't realise why they're getting an HDTV headache!
(Yes, I've played around with the sky digibox arsetunnel audio delay setting, and with the much better Sony Amp settings , but the audio-video synchronisation seems to vary with the Tides or the wind...)
you CAN follow the meteor showers by their radio/radar reflection - even in daylight - and should you be unwilling to foot the electricity bill for an 800Kilowatt VHF transmitter it seems NORAD have done it for us
http://icecast.nis.nasa.gov:8000/navspasur
this address (or some derivative of such) will end up at a 'live' streaming audio of doppler etc. reflections near space objects, or Tupolev Tu95's
with similar computer frustrations....
I refer you to http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USEIC74877020070717
though it doesnt quite specify if it was a shiny Apple product or a generic Wintel box. I suspect the latter as of course the Apple Sudden Motion Sensor would have of course deployed the Steve iParachute.
well, we have quite a few boys in blue here!
Carabinieri are the very professional guys - semi-military, who will also respond to traffic incidents if you ask them nicely. The 'dreaded' Guardia di Finanza have arrested me for buying a bottle of water without getting a VAT receipt, and trying to arrest me for having had a haircut for the same motive.
I fought the law and I won!
The Polstrada look cool and have a nice webpage where you can check-out their cruisers http://digilander.libero.it/autopolizia/page30.html
The Polizia del Stato State Police are mostly in evidence at the Italian Borders - though I have been called in for questioning about that dodgy document I accidentally signed 8 years ago.....
The Polizia Penitenziaria seem to run the prisons, Corpo Forestale seem to drive around in Green Landrovers a lot
"The Keystone Kops" of Italy are possibly the various groups of Polizia Proviniciale, Polizia Locale, Polizia Communale, Polizia Municipale, Vigili Urbani; rumour has it that they like uniforms and guns but were disqualified from joining one of the *real* forces, so they end up regularly extracting €50 fines from Motorists? (A vigili did shoot someone a couple of years ago in Milan, near La Scala, for a traffic infringement. They can have my €50 anytime!)
I'm sure there are other groups, some subsets worthy of a mention are the special "Hospital Attack Squad" of the Carabinieri , I believe, who - mostly in the Summer, swoop on an unsuspecting Ospedale and lock all the doors and start counting Doctors and Nurses and State Employees - to determine who is 'on duty' and 'at the beach' or possibly both!
Then there are just the unmarked cars that drive around with a flashing light on top, who are they? maybe SISMI going to arrest the other-half of SISMI or could it be my neighbour, Umberto Bossi's escort?
There are many opportunities to meet the nice Italian Police, armed checkpoints are quite common, where your car documents are controlled at machinegun-point, though nowadays many automatic radar "autovelox" are leading to database policing. Watch those speedlimits on the SuperStrada!
I have the only Mac in a multi-thousand M$ machine environment, actually that's not true, it was true in 2001 - when I had to keep a small box of WindowsNT for doing the corporate stuff, now I reckon we've a score or so Macbook Pro's and even an X-serve cluster seems to be growing nicely.
I found an ancient (actually it seems to be both ancient and current in a special M$ way) piece of M$ software, "Microsoft(R) Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac version 1.0.3 (C)1998-2002" which runs perfectly on the Macbook Pro , allows me to virtually appear on something called a Windows 2003 Server, and do my ten minutes a day of corporate Dilbert-duty.
Whilst browsing the Web for the free Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Linux, which I still haven't found - but may be out there somewhere - I was able to get an open source version from http://vcl.ncsu.edu/site/pages/help/linux-rdp-instructions.
having a distant virtual corporate windows box connected to my preferred Mac or Linux client would seem to free me from Patch Tuesday and the Zero-Day Hack Wednesday that might follow.
I don't think we need *really* need M$ on the desktop, do we?
quote "Chris Liddell said 11.6 million devices had sold since the November 2005 launch"
in other news outlets I'm sure I read "shipped" instead of "sold", also checking M$ statements in January where the 2007 target WAS 13 to 15 million, then lowered to 12 million, now this lower target nearly achieved by "stuffing the channel", in other words there are LOTS of X Boxes sitting on warehouse shelves somewhere!!!!
see "Microsoft admits XBox 360 channel now fully stuffed" at some Marketing Bog somewhere on earth. http://blackfriarsinc.com/blog/2007/01/microsoft-admits-xbox-360-channel-now
according to http://www.waitingforiphone.com/2007/07/05/att-activates-over-1-million-iphones/ , ATT have activated over a million iPhones
that means that only 0.33% of the US population have bought the shiny toy, in the first week. That sort of 'fanboy' adulation is worthy of attention and why-not flames too! however I'm reserving my flames in case Apple/O2 try to give us GPRS as the data feed in the EU.
With the UCW not yet having released the dates for their strike, but having to give 7 days notice for the strike yet HP7 'deathly hallows' is released in exactly 31 days; Amazon has over a million pre-orders for HP7 , you can see why Amazon isn't trusting the PO to deliver. There would be otherwise a few weeks of mounting pressure, bargaining, disputes, shouting - and that's just from the potentially deprived kids who might not get HP7 on release day.
it's a bit late to comment , I mean this was *last week's* news, but I think it's worth to mention that , as an Italian Resident , people are required to get the "Financial Identity Card" known as a Codice Fiscale. It's an anagram of your name consonants and birthdate with codes for your country of birth and a checksum, within 16 digits. This number must be quoted in all financial transactions.
The growing numbers of Chinese in Italy are currently forcing a redesign of the Codice Fiscale as there are increasingly identical 16 digit codes being produced, the horribly beweaponed "Guardia di Finanza" are not amused.
(Disclaimer : I was arrested by the G.D.F for buying a VAT free bottle of water)
Oh, there were also recently riots in Milan by the Chinese community when the G.D.F tried to enforce the VAT laws...
I'm sure I read of a scheme (the original article was in German I recall) on the darker side of the Playstation3 where a team was assembling a voluntary distributed grid project to primarily crack all PS3 game codes, then to secondarily use the assembled horde of Cell power to go after assorted general crypto keys. A sort of closed user special interest group version of SETI or Folding.
What about when the kilocore (=1000 8 bits CPU's on a chip) class of supercomputer chips start getting built up into widespread devices - then it'll be up to quantum entaglement to keep data (temporarily) 'secret'. Moores Law is perceived as still valid for the next 25 years or so, so in the end I don't know how secret data will eventually be kept secret!
to 'worry' the Info Assurance experts further, do we know how many coherent qubits the D-Wave has achieved yet?
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