Posts by Christian Berger

I'd like to have one with Debian/Ubuntu

Ideally with some slide-out or clamshell keyboard. I don't want an Apstore, I want a distribution.

So any bets

Any bets on how long that service will last?

So essentially I buy a Blu-Ray which I probably won't be able to watch after a few years because of hardware failures or licensing issues. (unless I rip it of course)

Plus I get the right to get another copy as long as that service exists.

So how exactly is that better than pirating or recording off television? (From a consumer perspective)

Please dear publishers, get rid of DRM on Blu-Ray and everything will be fine.

Actually

Well first of all, satellite telephones have been intercepted by amateurs probably since the 1980s. Back then many phone circuits were analogue C-Band transmissions. There still are some. There's also easily available software to decode Inmarsat transmissions.

As for Trojan horse software. I don't know if you have followed the developments in Germany. Just like with anything in IT, there's a _huge_ difference between advertisements and reality.

GSM decryption has been proven to work. There are a lot of talks about it on Chaos Communication Congresses. With enough effort you can surely decrypt it in real-time. The main problem for amateurs is the hopping sequence, however if you can spend enough money you can simply monitor all channels.

The main problem - Software

Essentially what one would need would be a modern version of GRAIL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM

Otherwise it'll be not much more than a semi-intelligent terminal.

Actually the software probably is the big advantage

Unlike GPUs DSPs always had an open instruction set. So it was always fairly easy to program them. It's so simple you can even program them in assembler.

Because of those open architectures, institutions buying those computers can develop Fortran compilers for them within weeks. And once you have Fortran, you can run most HPC software.

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG doesn't make any sense any more. There's no point in designing a document for printout. And this is essentially where "productivity software" fails.

I think we have moved beyond that. People now understand that there are multiple views to the same set of data. After all that's essentially what social services and, to lesser extent, search engines provide you with.

It is also the reason why Unix Power users like text files so much. You can simply turn them around and display the data in many different forms.

One step above that are SQL databases which, after more setup, provide you with even greater data processing power, but lower system integration.

Emulation would have been important for the review

PCL5 and Postscript are essential for Windows users and still a great time saver for people using Linux.

coal also isn't cheap...

coal is probably the second most subsidized form of energy in Germany.

Small waste compared to what happens daily in commercial environments.

In the company I work there are computers.... handed out to people who cannot program, not even BASIC, nothing, nada, zilch. They just sit around and act as expensive paperweights and once every year or so you need to replace the fans on the hugely overpowered graphics subsystems.

Yesterday I blew my bosses mind by installing a _wiki_. The poor guy never heard of such a thing.

Actually you can read a lot of their history

That digital HDTV recording experiment was done with 4 D2 or D5 recorders, those were early popular digital recording formats. I think you could already buy one analogue HDTV VTR the BCH-1000.

They did some amazing things in the past. For example they made a framestore, which is a solid state device which could store a whole video frame. It was about as large as a wardrobe and only consumed 5 kW of power. It stores a whole video frame in shift registers, because apparently RAM isn't available yet in the UK.(!?)

They also designed a machine called Anchor which was meant to be a replacement for Letraset sheets. It created letters and numbers purely electronically. Unlike digital systems, it uses analogue circuits to make wonderfully round shapes. From what I've seen it looks so much better than the blocky 5x7 pixel fonts of digital systems.

Ohh and they made a device which could transfer a video signal into a video. It worked by hooking up a high speed papertype puncher to a A/D converter. For every frame it did sample one pixel and punched it out. The papertype could then be read with just about any computer.

They did make some pretty nifty stuff there.

What we should learn from that

Never trust an API only promised by a single company. Keep your software portable.

Efficiency

As pointed out before, photosynthesis usually has a really low efficiency. If the efficiency of those new algae is much less (more than an order of magnitude) than the one of photovoltaic cells, it's not viable.

Obviously, if I may put on my conspiracy hat, there are many people interested in the continuation of oil-based economies, regardless of what's sensible.

I want it as goggles

Goggles are cool and that would give me an excuse to wear goggles. :)

What I always wonder is...

Are there 2 different versions of Flash, one for Web-Designers which kinda works, and one for the rest of us which doesn't work at all?

For Microsoft to succeed...

They would need an open platform which allows users to upgrade the operating system independent of the hardware. If they don't manage to do that, they'll be stuck at the 'Microsoft BASIC' level.

It would make sense for automated systems

It's fairly easy to detect lines and their cross sections. So if you wanted to build a satellite which automatically 'resets' its idea of its position, you can use such a pattern which can easily be precisely located even if visibility is low.

A simple grid or regular pattern is far harder to recognize as regular pattern can also occur by chance. That's less likely with such a pattern.

The great advantage of doing it this way is that there is no "calibration signal" which needs to be sent to the satellite for longer amounts of time. Instead you only need to send it the coordinates where it should take the picture and the coordinates where it should dump the data do. This could be done via many ways, even inconspicuously via RDS on FM-broadcast radio. Nobody would be any wiser where the control centre is.

You wouldn't even need to have a special monitoring station for that satellite since it will always report it's position. Normal monitoring (which everybody does) would be enough.

The problem most likely won't be an apocalypse

However in all likelihood that "economic crises" some people are predicting will come at some time in the future. It may be tomorrow, it may be a hundred years from now, but eventually every monetary system with interest will crash and did crash in the past.

This won't be a total apocalypse and you'll likely still have electric power an public transport, however things requiring large amounts of logistics and money might fail. For example Google services will shut down once advertisement income won't be able to cover their cost anymore.

In such a situation, being able to make a brick making machine is of great advantage. You can make bricks which is something of value you can trade for things you like. (e.g. food) Same goes for other devices. Having that knowledge puts you in a situation where you have an advantage.

Actually not a holographic display

Holographic displays, which have been shown at tiny sizes in laboratories, mimic the whole wave front. So essentially the viewer can focus on close and far objects selectively yet still have opacity. This system cannot provide opacity nor can it show objects outside of the box. True holographic displays are able to do that.

Other than that, you can simply build such a system yourself by using a corkscrew shaped "plane" and making it rotate, projecting an image onto it. (e.g. with a modified high-speed video projector)

@Bandwidth

Ohh another source is saying it's currently transmitting at 160 bits per second.

Here's the data.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports/index.htm

Data recovery

One of the big pluses of SSD is of course that when they are broken, they are quite simple to recover. A data recovery company will simply de-solder the chips and put them into a reader. This requires far less skill than getting the data off a broken HDD.

So for longer time storage SSD might already have a very good point.

Nice description

It's a nice description of commercial software licensing... and also the reason why I avoid commercially licensed software. It's not like I don't want to pay, but I want to be treated in a decent way.

technology vs. product

The big problem is that now such shows are about products not about technologies, it used to be the other way round. It used to be that you saw something cutting edge like a 3D printer, but you didn't see who manufactured it. You only learned that it exists.

Today you just see yet another incarnation of the same technology. You see yet another "smartphone" which is near identical to the hundreds of similar devices on the market. That's boring, nobody wants to see this.

Actually in computing there has been something in between. A show like Computer Cronicles would demonstrate a technology like Computer graphics based on a number of concrete products demonstrated.

In retrospect, perhaps one of the more interesting formats I have seen was the "Knoff Hoff Show" (knoff hoff is how a German would pronounce know how) which mixed science and technology with magic tricks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y551ay-1m8o

of course eventually this became very bizarre like in this later clip "explaining" a CD-writer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U2gPSjjVGU

The audience consisted of extras, BTW.

Anyhow, we do need more science and technology on television. We also need more programming courses. It's a shame that today few people seem to learn how to program than two decades ago.

And another point

The automatic alignment with that microphone only seems to detect level differences and the distance to the speakers. No attempt to measure the frequency response is made. However you have parametric equalisers so you can do that manually.

Glossy screen?

I'm sorry, but why didn't they just go with mate screens? Glossy screens will just scare away the non-Apple-Fanboy business crowd.

Radar could actually be a reason

Stricktly speaking radar and television shared the same technology. And it's not just the CRT, but also the wide band technology behind it. You cannot have radar, without having vacuum tubes which can amplify signals in the megahertz range.

The whisker thing

I thought that would be solved by now. We produce completely lead free for over a decade, and I don't think we ever had such a problem.

Actually I believe the main cause of hardware defects are production faults. Like the time when whole batches of electrolytic capacitors were made with a bad electrolyte. Or when improper capacitors were used, unsuitable for the voltages and temperatures in those devices.

If you ever want to get some nightmares

Look up "OLE for process control". It's an "open standard" for industrial process control. To get the specifications you need to be a member. Membership starts at $1500 a year. Documents are in PDF (at least) but the provided videos are in strange early 1990s codecs.

Of course the standard is based on DCOM which is an obsolete Windows technology. (A new technology based on TCP/IP is being developed now called OPC UA)

So seriously I doubt they would have needed to exploit Word. Someone who spends a lot of money on such system probably doesn't understand the slightest bit of security. You could most likely just have send them a greeting card in an encrypted ZIP file.

The issue about Postscript

It's actually quite simple, if you have a Postscript printer, it supports at least one open standard, Postscript. It's also likely they support other standards like PCL.

I have a non-Postscript printer. This means every time I want to get it running, I need to install some obscure piece of software which is not shipped with the distribution.

So Postscript is more a symptom of good printers and less a feature you actually want to use.

As for old printers, at my parent's place we have an old HP Laserjet 4 from 1992. It still works fine and the toner can be bought at any larger office supply store.

Missing a big problem

All the mentioned technologies require the consent of the TV channel, some of them even the one of the network operator. This means that you won't get the BBC in Germany, or in fact any half decent television.

So for me it will be VDR plus the streamdevserver-plugin. It can stream live television to a wide array of devices.

A sensible education measure

Of course most people will just use the GUI, just like they would do with Windows. However many people will start discovering the console since it's already there, just a few clicks away. They will discover powerful and efficient ways to use their computers to get problems solved.

So in the long run, they'll have an army of efficient computer users.

The more interresting question is...

Why is there even a discussion about this? Both sides seem to believe that they are right by logic. Of course you can always consider the other group to be full of idiots, but isn't that to simple?

I'm personally on the pro-Stallman front here. I acknowledge that he takes on an extreme view, however compared to what Apple used to do in the past, even Macs are severely limited by software.

What use are those in a teaching environment without a mac...

...and a developer account. Seriously, those boxes don't even have a BASIC interpreter.

So in a nutshell, the only thing it can do is replace things like books, at a hefty cost premium.

In a sensible world

That pump manufacturer would have to immediately recall all defective pumps. After all this is a dead serious problem.

What also should be communicated that this is not a problem caused by cost or computing power. It's a problem completely caused by idiocy and bad education. If the software programmers would have known the slightest bit about security, this wouldn't have happened.

Actually there's a lot wrong with TV

Though much of it can be solved today by open source solutions.

One point is of course DRM, which keeps you from actually doing anything with your recordings, like watching them on another device, or making screen shots of it, or uploading a portion of it to Youtube or whatever.

Then there are non-standard EPGs like the Freesat one which means that if you don't have a licensed receiver, you will only get now & next. (Although to be fair, many non-Freesat receivers actually have so little memory they only store now & next)

So in a nutshell, there would be a lot of things to be fixed... however I doubt Apple would fix any of those.

Again?

I thought such an attack has already been published in 2009.

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2009/26c3-3576-de-how_you_can_build_an_eavesdropper_for_a_quantum_cryptosystem.html

What I find worse than this...

Is that companies _will_ rather be paying royalties to Apple than doing more sensible things like having a lock/unlock switch or a clamshell design or maybe some sort of code entry.

So get over it and build sensible products. Don't just try to out-iPhone the iPhone, but make a product that's different. A product you can actually do something with.

There are different standards in television

While TBBT might be considered bland in the UK, Germany actually has a special version with added blandness to not disturb the viewers to much. It, for example, removes Sheldon's intonation.

Same goes for "The IT Crowd" which, to be honest I haven't seen much of the modified German version. (There also used to be a re-created German version which was only unintentionally funny.)

So while you might find shows like TBBT bland, the few Germans who can get Channel 4 find it a revelation. Same goes for experimental programmes like "Pages from Ceefax" which just feels like the deliberately pissing on every rule of television.

Competition?

I'm sorry, but there essentially is no competition in the "smart phone" market. There might be several companies, but they all try to create the same product. Nobody even attempts to fix the issues of current smart phones. Microsoft even deliberately makes the mistakes all the other companies already made, creating a system which is nearly indistinguishable from feature phones.