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Comment Re:Why do you need cable? (Score 1) 539

by TechV (#32842686) Attached to: Sidestepping A-to-D Convertors For Town Government's Cable TV?

Stupid, off topic question, but is there any place you know of online to read up on things like the Channel Plus? I've been dreaming for a long time of setting up an 'in-home' network where I've got my OTA channels as well as a few 'computer run' channels setup to pass through preexisting coax I have in my home. But have so little knowledge about the topic that I haven't been able to even craft a relevant Google query to start off from.

Actually your post is not that far off-topic, just a question that leads to a really warped work around to the problem of the root post.

As for a specific reply to your post: It can be done once you know what to look for. BUT, there are multiple items that must be considered as the ramifications from doing it improperly could lead to very hefty fines/bills from the FCC and/or your LCC (Local Cable Company). Setting up the system would not be to hard for myself (A licensed amateur radio operator and employee of a cable company) but may be quite a challenge for those without the specialized knowledge. So I will list all the warnings one should be aware of before naming the 'Device' that is the solution to the question.

The 'Device' has high potential to interfere with the signal of the LCC (Local Cable Company), degrading the signal to the subscribers in your neighborhood. Depending on how nice your LCC is, they may slap you with a fix-it bill. (My company has done this. Though, to repeat offenders) Luckily, this is the easiest to fix. Make sure you are not connected to the network of the LCC. If you do not have services with them, give them a call and ask for a total disconnect so as to prevent the interference. If you do still have ANY services with your LCC, you will have to call them and work with their technicians to prevent the interference. Though they will more than likely "fix" the problem by rendering your services unusable.

As soon as you turn on the 'Device' you become a Broadcaster. As a Broadcaster, the FCC can come after you. Especially because you will be working with frequencies that normally require a license to broadcast on. Don't worry too much about the FCC though. As long as your broadcasting is no higher than a predetermined power level, and does not cause any interference with anyone else, it is unlikely they will be coming. The problem is making sure that is the case. Made harder by the fact that you want to include an antenna in the system. I would suggest calling the local FCC office to have someone come out to perform measurements once the system is put together, but before you start using it.

As for what the 'Device' is, look for "RF Cable Inserter". Just remember; Even though anyone can buy and use the equipment. Not everyone should. Use of such equipment can make you liable if it is not done properly. Additionally I would suggest looking around the FCC website for rules and regulations. Unless you want to learn about setting up Radio Frequency transportation networks, or know someone to do it for you, this project may be too much for the standard home improvement tinkerer.

Feed Techdirt: TV Station Issuing DMCA Takedowns To Try To Hide Weatherman Making A Bad Joke (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
It's been well documented how many people/organizations abuse the DMCA takedown process to try (and usually fail) to make content they don't like disappear, even if there's a legitimate reason for it being up. In the latest such example, a weatherman in Boston made a comment that many considered to be... a bit off-color for the local evening news. In discussing the snowfall in certain areas, he noted: "Picking up some snow are we? Yes we are. In Princeton we picked up 9 inches of snow and in Billerica we had 7." Then there's a brief pause before he steps forward and says: "The biggest amount I could find--almost as big as me--about 9 inches." The station came up with an explanation for the statement, saying that he had a problem with his monitor and was displayed funny -- and thought that the viewing audience could see him that way too. Perhaps.

Still, though, the station, WHDH, has been aggressively issuing DMCA takedowns over the video (who knows how long the video above will stay up), even though it's almost certainly fair use, and courts have found that those sending takedowns need to take fair use into account. Justin Silverman, over at the Citizen Media Law Project, explains succinctly why this is almost certainly fair use:

In this case there's a fairly strong argument that the 27-second clip of Bouchard is fair. The amount of the original broadcast used is very small, the purpose of the clip is to spur public discussion, and there is arguably no effect on WHDH's news market. It's likely WHDH either didn't consider fair use before ordering the clip's takedown, or it simply didn't care.
And that's an issue. The DMCA allows copyright holders to shoot first and not care later. And that's a problem, because it can put a serious crimp on public discussion (which raises some serious First Amendment questions). Yes, in this case, it's just an off-color joke, but in many other cases it could be much more important speech.

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Science

Submission + - ESA Conducts Mars Terraforming Experiments on ISS (esa.int)

Submitted by geegel
geegel writes: Space is a hostile environment for living things, but small organisms on the Expose-E experiment unit outside Europe’s Columbus ISS laboratory module have resisted the solar UV radiation, cosmic rays, vacuum and varying temperatures for 18 months. A certain lichen seems to be particularly happy in open space. For more details see here

Feed Engadget: Nokia mounts huge Ovi Maps signpost on a crane in London (video) (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed
We're generally reluctant to cover purely promotional stunts like these, but when you decide to jack up a house-sized arrow on a crane and hang it next to London's Thames river, well, exceptions can be made. Nokia's big push to inform the world that Ovi Maps is free -- now and forever -- has culminated in the above sign, whose most appealing feature must be that it allows commoners like you and us to control it. People can send in a missive and coordinates via text or email, and then watch as the giant pointer rotates to the given direction and displays their wisdom to the world. See it in action after the break.

Continue reading Nokia mounts huge Ovi Maps signpost on a crane in London (video)

Nokia mounts huge Ovi Maps signpost on a crane in London (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feed Engadget: Sony returns to profitability as core electronics business struggles (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed
Finally, after closing 18% of its manufacturing facilities and cutting 20,000 heads across its global organization, Sony just posted a profit for the quarter. We're talking an operating profit of ¥146 billion ($1.5 billion) for the quarter on ¥2.2 trillion in sales. Sony's net profitability came in at ¥79.2 billion after three straight quarters of losses, handily beating The Street's mean estimate of ¥33.73 billion sending stock up some 4% at the time of this post. Unfortunately for us gadget nerds, Sony's return to prosperity is largely due to a doubling of sales at Sony's financial unit and a 16% rise in its movie business -- sales from its consumer products and devices division were off 11% thanks to flat-panel TV price competition and component costs. VAIO PC sales were up a slight 2% worldwide while sales of its venerable PS2 (2.1 million units vs. 2.5 million a year earlier) and PSP (4.2 million vs 5.1 million a year earlier) were both off for the quarter. At least the price cuts on the PS3 helped push sales up to 6.5 million from 4.5 million. Still, profit is profit and profit must grow regardless of crummy consumer sales, you know.

Sony returns to profitability as core electronics business struggles originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feed Techdirt: Awkward Stock Photo Blog Hit With DMCA Claim (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Brad Hubbard writes "One of my favorite sites, AwkwardStockPhotos.com received a legal nastygram claiming that by showing the stock photos from iStockPhoto.com (and linking back, with watermark in place), they were violating copyright. What they were actually doing was driving tens of thousands of hits directly to the iStockPhoto site, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that they increased the number of purchases of these otherwise humorously bad photos.

Sounds to me like these are all perfect Fair Use examples, being stomped by a company that didn't like how its product was being used. That makes me sad, but it's the way things are in the world of harsh ownership."

The blog, if you didn't know, basically found awkward stock photo images, but did so in a very promotional way, linking back to the original, and always including the original watermark. In other words, it was helping to advertise some rather unique iStockPhoto images -- and as the site notes, lots of other sites have done the same -- and even received book deals for it. It seems like iStock's parent company, Getty Images, totally overreacted to a site that was only helping them, and not harming the company at all.

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Feed Engadget: Intel teases six-core Gulftown, discusses tera-scale computing (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed
The 32nm dual-core Clarkdale processors that recently made their debut are about to pave the way for Intel's next performance crown chaser, the six-core Gulftown. You might've known that already, but Intel's decided to furnish us with the above slide detailing the particular differences between the two dies, with the most notable being the whopping 1.17 billion transistors that the new CPU will be composed of. The major attraction of Clarkdale chips lies in their power efficiency and competent integrated GPU, but the Gulftown focus will be firmly on the high end. Hence, there's no integrated graphics, but the built-in memory controller supports three channels of DDR3 RAM and even plays nice with lower-powered 1.35-volt sticks. There's also confirmation that the forthcoming hex-core chip will fit inside the familiar LGA-1366 socket, so if you bought a high end Core i7, worry not, you'll be able to replace your still blisteringly quick CPU with an even faster beast. Quad-core variants -- by virtue of disabling a pair of cores -- are on the cards as well, while Intel also took the opportunity to delve into questions of 1Tbps+ bandwidth interconnects and its 80-core processor project, but you'll have to hit up the links below to learn more about those.

Intel teases six-core Gulftown, discusses tera-scale computing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Book Reviews

Submission + - Book review: The Art of Scalability

Submitted by
Martijn de Boer
Martijn de Boer writes: "The Art of Scalability
Martin L. Abbott & Michael T. Fisher

Creating high performance growing networks is really a special skill managers and network architects should posses to be ready for the future. The Art of Scalability is a book written for these kinds of functions, and prepares you for the present and the imminent future. Scalability is achieved by principles that work on many levels within enterprises, wether it's processes, organizational structure or setting up your project, this book covers it all.

The sub-title for this book is "Scalable Web Architecture, Processes and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise" which is basically a catchy title for project managers and decision makers. It's just catchy enough to grab the book from a shelf and start digging into the table of contents, which is exactly the spot where you get hooked and decide to get the book.
The book is written by two experts on the subject; both of them have a strong background in large corporations dealing with scalability. Throughout the book the authors shine a good light on tools and cases used for making a project scalable.

The book is divided into four sections which follow the process of starting a scalable project. First off you will need to know everything about strategy, organizational structure, the kind of people your organization needs and how to manage your team.
The second part focuses on the how's and why's of scalability, aspects of planning for continuity, crisis and incident management. The later chapters in this second part talk about risks, how to value risk and the importance of testing to make educated conclusions about how far to scale your project, a notable mention here is chapter 19 which focuses on tradeoffs in development speed or doing things the right way, often an underestimated point in these businesses.
Architecting scalable solutions is the third part of the book, mainly taking a more technical approach to the matter. This part talks about containing faults and breaking up applications so they scale well. This goes all the way to scaling the database backend for your application to caching objects and making synchronous versus asynchronous calls to your application.
While most of the book is good for preparation, I think the fourth part of the book crosses the boundary from preparation to being very useful during the process as a fallback to your knowledge. It's titled accordingly “Solving other issues and challenges” and mainly focuses on things you will come across during the first and perhaps even later stages, providing solutions for unforeseen costs of data storage to monitoring your application for user experience, speed and the processes you will have to implement for this.

If you have read this far, and are thinking about how complex scalability really is, then you have found the right book. The clear writing style and detailed writing of numerous pitfalls for such big projects make this book a valuable asset to your knowledge base. It's also written in a challenging way, and between the lines there is also some humor (evident for instance in the reference to Rain Man in chapter 18), making it a fun way to learn or build upon a great skill set needed by organizations in the not so distant future.
I feel very positively about the writing style of the book, but despite there being some illustrations there could be some more diagrams of organizational structure and the architecture of projects as I didn't find the illustrations adding much to the context.

The short appendixes to the book are mostly about calculating capacity for cpu power, bandwidth, etcetera. These appendixes actually provide sample calculations which are useful to backup your analysis when you need to make a bill of materials for your superiors and can also be used to better grasp the size of a project. Numbers mostly provide a context for the people above you, and I think these extra pieces of content could have deserved another part in the book, but perhaps it's better off as some food for thought.

Before starting with this book, I had not much prior knowledge about scaling projects other then some technical ideas of implementation. I always hate it when I know I'm just scratching the surface of something, and need to satisfy my urge to learn more about the subject. The Art of Scalability really helped me accomplish that, and provided much more background information then I expected. I was really surprised by the pieces about cloud computing, it's such a buzzword nowadays but the texts give it a real context.

If you are looking to set up a project or are generally interested by the concepts of scalability, then this is the right book for you. It's an appropiate recommendation for most businesses, because this knowledge can only be used to your advantage and just takes a little bit of time to read trough. It's a heavy subject, but once you finish the book you will be able to make a decision about architecture based on a good foundation of background information rooted in real situations.

The book is available on Safari Books online, the publishers portal Informit.com and other popular retailers.

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780137031436
http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0137030428
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Art-of-Scalability/Martin-L-Abbott/e/9780137030422/?itm=1"
Transportation

Submission + - NASA Unveils All-Electric Personal Flight Vehicle (inhabitat.com) 2

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: NASA is currently working on a personal aircraft that will put jet packs to shame. The Puffin is an all-electric one-man airplane that could be the start of some new and amazing air travel technology. With two prop electric engines, lithium phosphate batteries and a top speed of almost 300 mph, the vertical take off and landing vehicle was originally designed for covert military insertions because it has a lower heat signature than combustion engines. The Puffin would also be super quiet – 10 times quieter than current low-noise helicopters, and since the engine is electric it has no flight ceiling and can fly up to 9,150 meters high uninhibited by thin air .
Power

Submission + - Massive Solar Updraft Towers Planned for Arizona (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: Australia-based EnviroMission Ltd recently announced plans to build two solar updraft towers that span hundreds of acres in La Paz County, Arizona. Solar updraft technology sounds promising enough: generate hot air with a giant greenhouse, channel the air into a chimney-like device, and let the warm wind turn a wind turbine to produce energy. The scale of the devices would be staggering — each plant would consist of a 2,400 foot chimney over a greenhouse measuring four square miles. The Southern California Public Power Authority has approved EnviroMission as a provider, although there’s still plenty of work to be done before the $750 million, 200 megawatt project can begin.

Submission + - FTC worries about consumers,cloud data and privacy

Submitted by pcause
pcause writes: Ars Techina has a nice article about the FTC's concern that consumers don't understand the implications of storing their data in the cloud. From the article: But that data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time. And those are just the phone settings. Google also has access to search history data, anything stored in Google Docs or Spreadsheets, complete schedules stored in Google Calendar, and recent Maps searches. Combine them all, and companies like Google become one-stop shops for authorities looking for personal information.

Have /. readers really thought about this? Do you think the average consumer even has a clue about this issue?

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