« October 2004 | Main | December 2004 »

November 05, 2004

There are no firsts.

Here's a partial and very incomplete history of the operation of Internet-connected computers in space.

In 1996, an experiment onboard the STRV-1b satellite, conducted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, gave the satellite an IP address and communicated with it.

In 2000, a TCP/IP stack was uploaded to the UoSAT-12 satellite, and some simple experiments were run by NASA Goddard. SSTL, who built UoSAT-12, went on to adopt TCP/IP for satellite control and telemetry in their Disaster Monitoring satellites. The first of these satellites, AlSAT-1, was launched in 2002.

In 2001, SoftPhone was used on a laptop PC onboard the space shuttle, talking VoIP the Internet way across a local Ethernet LAN that was connected to the shuttle's custom equipment that communicated with NASA Johnson Space Center. The laptop was orbiting, and commercial laptops had been used previously onboard the shuttle; the laptop was a node on the Internet.

The reason I mention all of this is that Jim Benson of SpaceDev is continually on record as saying that CHIPsat is the "first orbiting node on the Internet" -- yet CHIPsat was launched in January 2003. CHIPsat's launch delays aren't significant; all missions have launch delays.

And CHIPsat was built for NASA, an organisation that appears to have achieved the first orbiting node on the Internet a number of separate times. Still, those that do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

Posted by Lloyd at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

Video changed the AAC store.

The iPod Photo, combined with iTunes, can give you tiny colour pictures of the artist or album to look at while you listen to a song in AAC format that you've bought from Apple's online music store. That hardly seems worth it.

This iPod may not be suited to watching hours-long cinema, but if you do want to watch something for three minutes or so while listening to a song you've bought... iTunes should also sell pop videos for playing on the iPod Photo.

(Having said this, I don't like iTunes and I don't own an iPod. But I did get into the habit of buying CD singles also containing digital video, because that content is unrestricted by digital rights management.)

Posted by Lloyd at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2004

Evils of the age.

Last night I watched both The Corporation and Fahrenheit 9/11. After all, it was Hallowe'en, when monsters come out in the open.

Near the end of his film, Michael Moore quotes George Orwell. Fitting, and perhaps the film's intellectual peak.

Internet Veterans for Truth entirely trumps p2p-politics for finding related content, by the way.

Posted by Lloyd at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)