July 24th, 2008 DJB
Domain Lagoon
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Stonerocket
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Express yourself with an i.ph domain
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July 24th, 2008 DJB
Emo and goth to be made illegal in Russia
The Russian government is in the process of drafting a law to make emo and goth music illegal.
Last month a parliamentary committee was convened to discuss a draft proposal of the Russian government’s Government Strategy In The Sphere Of Spiritual And Ethical Education bill, the details of which were leaked to The Moscow Times. The newspaper subsequently reported that, among other things, the draft bill dubbed the musical movements a “dangerous teen trend” and called for emo and goth websites to be regulated and young people dressing like emos or goths to be banned from entering schools and government buildings.
The newspaper interviewed one of the bill’s authors, Igor Ponkin from the Russian Interior Ministry’s Public Oversight Council. Ponkin called emo a “social danger” and “a threat to national stability” and said the bill is a reaction to teen suicides such as the tragic death of British teenager Hannah Bond.
“This type of behaviour is a crucial part of emo ideology,” said Ponkin. “Of course there are emo teens who just listen to their music. But our actions are not directed at them but rather at those who also hurt themselves, commit suicide and promote those acts.”
The Moscow Times also interviewed psychologist Inna Cherkova who said:
“Suicide is not a symptom of emo culture. I work with other teens too, and every group has emotionally troubled kids.”
However, the bill is expected to become law in Russia before the end of the year.
Source: Kerrang
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June 11th, 2008 DJB
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
Sat on the start grid, foot poised over the accelerator, you wait for the row of red lights to extinguish. Alongside you are top names like Lewis Hamilton, Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen. The cars’ engines are screaming and everyone is poised to go. For any Formula One fan the chance to race against their heroes would be a dream come true.
Sadly, the closest most of us have ever got is watching the Grand Prix on television. But that could soon change if a company from the Netherlands has its way.
“It’s clear that the next trend in gaming is going to be bringing real objects into the virtual world; playing not against other gamers but people doing the real thing,” said Andy Lurling, founder of iOpener Media.
The patented system his company is developing sucks in real-time GPS data from racing events and pumps it out to compatible games consoles and PCs.
The idea is that you could pit yourself against the top drivers in the world, as it happens, from the comfort of your living room.
“You can compete against the best of the best,” he told BBC News.
‘Hardcore appeal’
And if all of this sounds far fetched, think again.
The European Space Agency (Esa) was so impressed with his proposal, it gave Mr Lurling’s company a grant to develop a proof of concept. A German venture capitalist has stumped up cash to develop it further.
He has already tested it with an F1 car and plans to have the first games on the market as early as September this year.
“At this point we have lots of interest and we are looking for the right partner to launch,” he said.
The firm is currently in talks with six developers about using the technology.
Gareth Wilson, design manager at Bizarre Creations, makers of the Project Gotham Racing series, says he thinks games with the real-time feature would “excite a hardcore minority of gamers”.
“Formula 1 and similar complex simulation games are getting less mass market nowadays, compared to their more arcade-style heyday in the late 90s,” he told BBC News.
“This sort of feature would probably appeal to the hardcore gamer or F1 fan more than a mass market gamer.
“Having said that, the hardcore would totally love it.”
Bizarre Creations is not currently one of the firms evaluating the system.
Precision position
At the core of iOpener’s technology is an enhanced GPS system known as differential GPS (DGPS).
This uses a network of fixed base stations to correct the GPS signal, which on its own may only be accurate to within 10m. DGPS is commonly used for air navigation or shipping where precision is key.
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1. Car position located with Global Navigation Satellite Systems
2. Location data and car telemetry is beamed to a track side server
3. Data is tagged with unique ID of the car and sent over the internet
4. Information stored on servers and “mediacast” to gamers.
Whole process from car to gamer takes less than five seconds
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“With that we know the location and the velocity of the car,” explained Mr Lurling.
As further precision is needed, iOpener can use information from the European EGNOS network, which augments GPS satellite signals to provide positional data accurate to within 2m.
Other tweaks include fitting cars with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), commonly used in guided missile systems, which measure acceleration, angle and yaw of the object.
“IMUs give accuracy on a short range,” Mr Lurling told BBC News.
“Combined with DGPS, we know the location of the car to within less than 30 centimetres.”
In addition, the system collects telemetry data from the car, which is fitted with a small computer, transmitter and the GPS receiver.
“That is already good enough data for a game,” he said.
Telemetry is commonly collected by track-side engineers to monitor the vehicles’ performance and can include information such as acceleration and what gear the car is in.
It has already used by games developers to build more realistic simulations.
Designers at Bizarre Creations used the telemetry to generate accurate track models for early F1 games, before detailed circuit maps existed, for example.
From the track side, the data is sent over the net to a server farm, where it is saved before being pumped out - or “mediacast” - to eager gamers.
The delay between collecting the data and the gamer being immersed in it is up to five seconds, similar to the lag on a TV broadcast.
“We also store the data, so not only can you play the game in real time, but you can replay races at a later date,” said Mr Lurling.
Intelligent gaming
The company does not intend to develop its own games; rather it will provide the backbone for games developers to build on to.
But it will provide some software; specifically an artificial intelligence (AI) program to make sure that the virtual and real worlds blend seamlessly.
Artificial intelligence handles collisions between real and virtual drivers
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“If Hamilton is driving behind you he can’t see you [in the game], so he would drive right through you,” explained Mr Lurling.
“So the AI takes over at that point and you see a very realistic overtaking.”
The system also handles the results of in-game collisions between real and virtual drivers.
In this case, the real car always drives away. The gamer’s fate is less certain.
“We go for optimal realism but the game experience has to be right,” he said.
Mr Wilson agrees with this approach.
“There is a huge difference between what happens in the real world and what happens in video games - even the most ‘realistic’ simulator has to bend real world physics to make the game more fun,” he said.
However, even with the AI, he thinks gamers may encounter a more fundamental frustration with the system.
“I know I wouldn’t even get close to the lap times that Lewis Hamilton could run, unless my car in the virtual world had a load of extra grip and power - which might defeat the point,” he said.
At the moment, iOpener is concentrating firmly on racing games, but believes that there is a huge market for the system in other sports.
“You can think of biking, rowing, skiing and snowboarding,” said Mr Lurling.
“In the next three to five years, we believe that games will not be ‘triple A’ games unless they have our feature in,” he said.
Mr Lurling was the 2006 Dutch regional winner of the European Satellite Navigation Competition (Galileo Masters) which aims to find novel uses for location data. The 2008 competition is now open to entries, until 31 July.
Posted in Gaming | 3 Comments »
May 3rd, 2008 DJB
The broadband crunch
An ‘exabyte’ is a lot of data. It is 1.074 billion gigabytes of data, to be exact. It would take 14 million laptops like mine to store an exabyte. Two exabytes equals the total volume of information generated back in 1999. Today, the internet is handling one exabyte of data every single hour.
The sheer size of the internet, not to mention seemingly universal access to it, makes it easy to forget how young the net really is.
Many of us are now so familiar with – and reliant on – this technology that it’s hard to believe it is such a recent development, but it has been with us for a mere blink of an eye in historical terms: speedy commercial access to the world wide web barely made it to us by the end of the 20th century.
Something like YouTube would have seemed like a crazy dream just 10 years ago. Six million videos on a single website, each available to watch in an instant? Impossible.
Bandwidth-hungry online video
But now online video streaming is a reality - and enormously popular. However, downloading a 30 minute television programme consumes more bandwidth than receiving 200 e-mails every day for a year. Small wonder then that the internet is already working hard to keep up with our demands.
This growing demand for online video and streaming television (like the BBC’s iPlayer and Channel 4’s 4oD) is draining the internet’s capacity to deliver data. “Changes in internet usage have quickly turned the internet into an entertainment medium,” says Asam Ahmad of broadband provider Virgin Media. “And there does need to be an open discussion about how bandwidth is managed.”
Broadband providers
ISPs currently use moderate measures to ensure the most extreme bandwidth hogs do not ruin it for the rest of us. Virgin Media, for instance, uses a ‘non-discriminatory’ policy of peak time traffic management, based on a user’s total bandwidth consumption, which might temporarily lessen the speed of a video junkie’s connection if his or her usage has been particularly high.
These measures have been effective so far, and the burden of increasing demands might not have been felt yet - but it will soon. Experts are predicting a ‘broadband crunch’ come 2010, wherein increasing use of bandwidth-hungry services will bring the internet to a virtual standstill.
A report by Nemertes Research, a group that analyses the business value of emerging technology, says that current investment in internet infrastructure is insufficient to meet growing bandwidth demands.
“The network is coping”
Speaking to MSN, a BT spokesman acknowledged the issue but downplayed its severity. “It’s a commercial issue for certain internet service providers. If usage patterns progressively increase because customers are doing things which are increasing their use of bandwidth, and if those customers are charged a fixed price for a fixed amount of bandwidth, then there is a question about whether certain business models are sustainable.
“On a technical level: can the network physically cope? As things stand, the network is coping. Though if you were to ask whether the network in shape for the streaming of multiple broadcast-quality TV-type signals all over the internet to every home in the land… then that will probably require considerable investment in the network.” Because although the internet advances very quickly, the large-scale infrastructure that supports it, delivering it to homes and offices around the country, has not quite kept up.
The hardware problem
The internet video boom is being handled in the UK by networks which, in many places, were originally intended to carry voice calls only. It is testament to some very clever engineering that old hardware has been enabled to cope with as much as it has – but this cannot go on forever.
The problem lies not with the modern fibre optics and underground cabling of the internet’s main motorways, whose high technology and vast capacities mean data can zip from one part of the world to another in next to no time. The limiting factor comes at the last stage of the journey: in the routers, switches and copper wires that run finally from an exchange into a home.
When it comes to broadband speeds, the UK already lags behind many other countries. About 90 per cent of South Korea is hooked up with an average advertised broadband speed of 43 Mbps. In France the average is about 44 Mbps, whereas Japan has an astounding 90 Mbps. These figures all put the ‘up to 8 Mbps’ connections typically offered by UK providers in the shade.
A return to dial-up speeds?
What would a ‘broadband crunch’ mean for UK internet users? The Nemertes report predicts that if the problem is not addressed, users could be looking at a gradual return to the speeds of the dial-up networking of yesteryear. For those of us who know the joys of 28.8 kilobits per second modems, this is a worrying prospect.
The study says the slow-down will change our experience of the web. “[In the future] it may take more than one attempt to confirm an online purchase or it may take longer to download the latest video from YouTube,” says the report. More significant still is the crunch’s potential braking effect on internet progress. Online innovations – the next YouTube, iPlayer, eBay, or something entirely new and different – might simply not get off the ground if networks cannot support them.
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It’s not difficult to see why large-scale internet infrastructure has been neglected: upgrading such a system is a mammoth task. Although installing speedy fibre optic connections to homes nationwide is the most obvious of solutions, it represents an enormous expense and a huge amount of work. With the internet working adequately for the time being, many would hardly see the need for an upgrade, not to mention resent the digging up of roads across the country. Finally, there is the issue of who would foot the multi-billion pound bill.
An expensive project
When internet service providers have to compete with each other’s prices to win customers, an expensive, long-term project like fibre-to-the-home does not appeal. This, however understandably, leads to an approach that may not be viable in the long run.
Other providers believe they already have the problem in hand. “We will be rolling out a 50 Mbps service on our entire network at the end of the year,” Virgin Media told MSN. “”The technology we are putting into the network can theoretically cope with 300 Mbps upstream and downstream simultaneously. 50 Mbps is a good upgrade for now.”
This year, BT will trial 100Mbps fibre-to-the-home connections at an estate of new homes in Ebbsfleet, with a view to using the project as a feasibility study for further high-speed connections.
Who should cover the costs?
Alternatively, we might ask those who generate the demand for bandwidth to cough up. There have already been whispers that the likes of YouTube and iPlayer should contribute to the networks that support their services. But then could these services realistically remain free?
The solution might well require a government-funded initiative. It would be a worthy endeavour, one that would drive the nation’s technology forward and prepare us for the exponential growth of the internet. But it would also ultimately be a project funded by taxpayer money - and thus not necessarily popular.
The government recently launched a review on next-generation broadband access. “Its purpose is to look at the government can pave the way for faster broadband and minimise the cost for private sector investment – and what barriers there are to that investment,” a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform told MSN. “Still, the roll-out of next-generation access should be private sector led, with minor public sector intervention.”
Looking ahead
The way forward – and the extent of the ‘broadband crunch’ threat – is not yet altogether clear. The solution may be something other than to fibre-to-the-home; it may not involve any kind of cabling at all. To bridge the sluggish so-called ‘last mile’ between exchange and home, wireless broadband services are another option for enabling the next generation of internet access.
“New wireless WiMAX technology shows it possible to achieve download speed of up to 65 Mbps at close range to users,” says David Hill of Spirent Communications, a telecommunications testing firm. “This would be sufficient to plug many of the gaps in the internet infrastructure quickly and at much lower cost and inconvenience than digging up roads to lay new cable.”
Finally, Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards recently proposed an altogether different approach: using our existing sewer network to house internet infrastructure. It was a tentative suggestion, with Richards recommending further study. “We need to establish what the position is here and whether or not duct access has a role to play in the development of competitive next-generation access. So, in cooperation with operators we intend to undertake a survey of the existing duct network.”
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May 1st, 2008 DJB
Internet Innovators
These are the Internet Innovators that have had a direct and profound impact on our daily lives.
The internet has come a long way since it spun its first Web.
We highlight an internet innovator that has perhaps received less recognition than they deserve: the unsung hero of the Domain Name System.
Dr Paul V. Mockapetris
Dr Paul V. Mockapetris is the man who wrote the internet address book. The Domain Name system was invented in 1983 at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute.
The innovation was borne out of a shortcoming of a very early Internet (ARPAnet) and the Domain Name System was seen as a way around this limitation.
What is a DNS?
The DNS can be considered the nuts and bolts of the internet.
DNS stands for Domain Name System, in simple terms it translates a hostname e.g. www.stonerocket.net into an IP address.
Each IP (Internet Protocol) address serves as a unique identifier and acts as a locator for one device to communicate with another. An IP address is made up of a string of numbers which all follow a similar format; four numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255 and separated by decimal points.
Today, we commonly refer to the Domain Name as a URL. A Domain Name is easier to remember than a string of numbers. Can you imagine trying to tell someone the name of a really cool website but instead having to recite an IP address? The URL eliminates this hassle, being memorable and a lot simpler to remember.
In order for a website to succeed the necessity for a good Domain Name is crucial. The Domain Name you use can have a huge impact in the way that both people and search engine spiders view your site.
Throughout his career Mockapetris has made many contributions to the research community, before the days of Ethernet he conducted some work with early LAN (Local Area Network) technology. He is also credited as assisting in the creation of the first SMTP e-mail server alongside Jonathan Postel in 1982.
Did you know that the first DNS implementation was nicknamed ‘Jeeves’.
Paul Mockapetris would later become the Director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. and is currently Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum, Inc.
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