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Comment Experienced system in operation during Olympics (Score 4, Interesting) 341

by chicane (#41095183) Attached to: Sources Say ITU Has Approved Ultra-High Definition TV Standard

The BBC and NHK collaborated to demonstrate this system during the olympics , broadcasting to 3 sites in UK , 2 in US and 2 in Japan.
Further detail See http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/08/the-olympics-in-super-hi-visio.shtml
The opening/closing ceremony were broadcast live whereas during the rest of the week a daily hour long highlights package covering the opening ceremony and specific events package was compiled and broadcast on a daily basis.
I was fortunate enough to experience the system at Bradford Museum of the Moving Image on a 15 metre square screen and a couple of megawatts of sound..
With reputedly only 3 cameras in the world camera angles were somewhat limited, the opening ceremony coverage placed you in the heart of the stadium as if you were an audience member showing off the wide field of vision offered. I found the 22 channels of sound to be somewhat overwhelming in volume which I judged to be a bit of a cheap trick to impress. As with initial experience of Hidef the enhanced resolution can lead one to examine detail towards the edge of the field of vision. I was slightly disappointed that there was some blockiness at the edge. This may be due to focussing issues, focus is performed away from the camera.
All in all I found it quite comparable to the Imax experience excepting lack of 3d.

Comment Re:Cost (Score 1) 312

by chicane (#40329633) Attached to: Online Activities To Be Recorded By UK ISPs

Purportedly a primary benefit is a reduction in crime or should that be the detection of crime! But given UK governments track record on cost reductions this seems unlikely to be realised.
It's a case of another land grab for more monitoring powers after they failed last time round with a Labour administration.
it should be interesting to see those who opposed whilst in opposition supporting it now they are in power.

Submission + - OHA lead tips Android 2.3 incoming (slashgear.com)

Submitted by Arvisp
Arvisp writes: Android 2.3 Gingerbread is fast approaching, according to Open Handset Alliance “Leadership Team” member Alvaro Fuentes Vasquez. According to his (translated) Twitter message, developers should “Prepare your Nexus One (Developer version) for Android OTA update 2.3 (Gingerbread) in the next few days,” a timescale that fits into previous rumors about the Android SDK.
Meanwhile a recent Flash Player 10.1 update also added fuel to the fire, suggesting that developers should look to installing the software prior to November 11. That date – this coming Thursday – has been heard on several occasions, and it looks like developer Nexus One handsets will be getting a friendly Gingerbread update before the week is out.
Security

Submission + - The Economics of Targeted Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers and security vendors have been telling us for years now that attackers have developed sophisticated, targeted attacks designed to separate victims from their money as quickly and cleanly as possible. If that's so, why aren't all of us being compromised on a regular basis? A researcher from Microsoft Research posited at the WEIS 2010 workshop Tuesday that the answer is simple economics.

The amount of time and money it takes to send out 10 million phishing emails versus five million emails is negligible once the attacker has his infrastructure in place. As a result, these attacks are still quite prevalent, despite their diminishing economic return. But even with relatively low returns per attack, these kinds of scalable attacks yield a high profit for professionals, said Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research."Non-scalable attacks have to be selective attacks. Every attack costs you something," Herley said. "If the non-scalable attacks can't match the return of the scalable attacks, she should change tactics. At equal costs, she needs a way better yield. But competing on yield makes no sense because when she extracts the same value per victim, there's too much effort."
Linux

Submission + - Linux dev up says Eclipse Foundation survey

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Eclipse Foundation released its 2010 Eclipse Community Survey results, which reveal an interesting snapshot of one slice of the development community. Despite the bias (most of the respondents are Eclipse users), the results show the rise of Linux as a favored platform for development. This year, 32.7 percent of respondents cited Linux as their development platform, up 5.8 percent from 2009, and 12.7 percent from the 2007 survey. However, blogger Brian Proffitt points out a troubling finding — that open source participation seems to be stalled. According to the report, in terms of corporate policies towards open source participation, 48% of the respondents in 2009 claimed they could contribute back to OSS versus only 35.4% in 2010.

Submission + - Water Main Break Floods Dallas Data Center (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by miller60
miller60 writes: IT systems in Dallas County were offline for three days last week after a water main break flooded the basement of the Dallas County Records Building, which houses the UPS systems and other electrical equipment supporting a data center in the building. The county does not have a backup data center, despite warnings that it faced the risk of service disruption without one.

Submission + - HP gives printers email addresses (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allow people to print from devices such as smartphones and the iPad. The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own — or someone else's — printer. It will also let people more easily share physical documents, as rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer. The email address could overcome the need for specific printer drivers on devices such as smartphones, Apple's iPad (which doesn't currently offer printing facilities) and Google's forthcoming Chrome OS devices.
Hardware

Submission + - When mistakes improve performance (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Professor Rakesh Kumar at the University of Illinois has produced research showing that allowing communication errors between microprocessor components and then making the software more robust will actually result in chips that are faster and yet require less power. His argument is that at the current scale errors in transmission occur anyway and that the efforts of chip manufacturers to hide these to create the illusion of perfect reliability simply introduces a lot of unnecessary expense, demands excessive power and deoptimises the design. He favors a new architecture, which he calls the "stochastic processor" which is designed to gracefully handle data corruption and error recovery. He believes he has shown such a design would work and that it will permit Moore's Law to continue to operate into the foreseeable future. However, this is not the first time someone has tried to fundamentally revolutionize the CPU. The Transputer, the AMULET, the FM8501, the iWARP and the Crusoe were all supposed to be game-changers but died a cold, lonely death instead — and those were far closer to design philosophies programmers are currently familiar with. Modern software simply isn't written with the level of reliability the Stochastic Processor requires in mind (and many software packages are too big and too complex to port), and the volume of available software frequently makes or breaks new designs. Will this be "interesting but dead-end" research, or will the Professor pull off a CPU architectural revolution really not seen since the microprocessor was designed?"

Comment Re:yet another book on a specific aspect of drupal (Score 1) 35

by chicane (#32324272) Attached to: Drupal 6 Attachment Views

That its written in PHP doesnt make it inherently good or bad after all a dictionary contains the words making up both the most expressive poetry and the simple tabloid headlines.

A Conversation relies upon a vocabulary in common and in my experience(defined above) Drupal fails to clearly define that vocabulary and explain it readily.

It seemed appropiate to the task but I would probably not choose to develop in it subsequently

Comment yet another book on a specific aspect of drupal! (Score 1) 35

by chicane (#32323976) Attached to: Drupal 6 Attachment Views

Having invest 300hrs+ in drupal 6 and having a bookshelf of some 15 books on specific aspects I remain disappointed by the sprawling architecture and lack of cohesion of this product.
I look forward to a book that can bring order to the chaos that i perceive drupal currently to be with its multitude of modules however this evidently is not that book.
On a secondary note with drupal 7 currently in its fifth alpha iteration i suspect this book is designed with obsolescence in mind.

Maybe somehow i failed to drink the kool-aid
Security

Submission + - Bouncing Autonomous Intelligent Botnets (daniweb.com)

Submitted by coomaria
coomaria writes: Thought that 2009 was the year that botnets died, well think again, it was actually the year they bounced back. Compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world, every single day this year — and it's going to get worse if intelligent and autonomous botnets arrive in 2010 as predicted here.
The Military

Submission + - $26 of software defeats American military. (wsj.com) 2

Submitted by reporter
reporter writes: According to a report just published by the "Wall Street Journal", SkyGrabber — a computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet — can read and store the data transmitted on an unsecure channel by an unmanned drone. Drones are crucial to American military operations, for these aerial vehicles enable Washington to conduct war with a reduced number of soldiers.

The Iranians have taught Islamic thugs in Iraq how to read the intercepted data. " ... the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance. ... Some of the most detailed evidence of intercepted feeds has been discovered in Iraq, but adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, according to people briefed on the matter. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said."

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