Worth a read

Building the home theatre of your dreams
ROD EASDOWN
November 25, 2009



Setting up the home theatre of your dreams takes time, money and patience but you'll never regret it.

My mate Neil began lusting after a plasma screen as soon as he heard about them 10 years ago. The stumbling block was always his wife, who couldn't see the point of spending all that money on a big screen when they already had a perfectly good television.

Through the years the prices of plasmas plummeted but Neil's requests to buy one were always met with his wife's standard rebuttal: they're too expensive.

Then, on a one-week visit to New Zealand, Neil happened to buy the right lotto ticket and came home $NZ200,000 ($160,400) richer. The first thing he did was throw away his return ticket on Jetstar to get a "proper" airline seat and the second was buy a plasma. His wife's standard objection was suddenly as empty as the old TV cabinet.

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Screen size - how big is big enough?
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The install - stuff you need to know
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Four days after it was installed I rang her to ask what she thought. "You can't drag me away from it," she said. "It's wonderful, simply wonderful."

Now this is not a one-off story. I know this because the same thing happened at our place. My partner couldn't see any point in cluttering up the wall with a big plasma when we had a perfectly good, if rather dated, 68-centimetre Sony. Right up until Pioneer lent me a road-test unit for a couple of weeks.

All went fine until the guys turned up to take it back. She was inconsolable. So, once again, I floated the idea of buying one and the response, in summary, was: "Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes!"

From my experience, therefore, by far the most difficult part of getting a home theatre is gaining the permission of the person with whom you share the house. And once this particular mountain has been climbed, you may be tempted to assume everything else is a doddle, to which I would respond: "No. Oh no, no, no!"

If you're going down the five-speaker-plus-subwoofer surround sound route - and why wouldn't you? - you first have to figure the best way to work all those speakers into your living room. Despite the many options here (satellite speakers, normal speakers, in-wall and in-ceiling speakers; you can even buy speakers disguised as rocks), it's a task fraught with difficulty, especially since you also have to find enough vacant wall for your large flat-panel screen.

At our place we had to ditch a cabinet and turn everything through 90 degrees to put the screen on a formerly useless free-standing wall, which presented a challenge so great the installer declared it impossible. Then his boss came out and told him how to do it.

Valuable lesson one: when an installer excavates a speaker cable channel up a single brick wall and into the ceiling, do check who is cleaning up. Otherwise it will be you.

Valuable lesson two: when an installer excavates, he does not concern himself with filling the channel back in. That's a job for a plasterer. So now you need a plasterer. After the plasterer you will need a painter.

Valuable lesson three: surprisingly few installers are licensed electricians. If you need an extra power point, your installer may not be able to assist. But what's another tradesman at this point?

Valuable lesson four: check that your installer is familiar with audio installations. Otherwise you may find the speaker cables he inserts are little better than electrical flex.

Once the cables are laid, you'd assume all that's between you and home cinema nirvana is hooking everything up. You're about to learn that nothing in home cinema is ever this easy and this is where it really pays to buy your equipment through a specialist supplier rather than what these specialists sniffily refer to as box shops.

Such people know one brand of amplifier goes all huffy when it's connected to another brand of DVD player. They know how to get around the decidedly perplexing set-up menu system of a variety of 7.1-channel receiver I hesitate to name for fear of being sued to Tokyo and back. They know that some flat-panel screens need far more ventilation than others and cannot be mounted over fireplaces.

After a jolly good laugh, they can even figure how to incorporate your old and much-loved laserdisc player in the system.

And, if they're any good, they'll keep coming back until your Blu-ray player's intermittent refusal to provide any sort of vision with its sound is sorted.

Valuable lesson five: deal with a local business; you'll be going back there a lot.

Installation cost me just over $1000 and, given the work required and the follow-up when all the glitches happened, it was worth every cent. My overall budget, however, proved a tad optimistic.

Observing my own first law of home cinema, I spent as much on the sound as on the vision. My magnificent 127-centimetre plasma cost $5000 and I spent that much again (maybe a little more) on speakers, amplifier and Blu-ray player.

Valuable lesson six: the free movies that come with some Blu-Ray players aren't worth a cracker.

I can't say how glad I am that I bought a sound system with genuine horsepower. The sound is sensational, especially from Blu-ray discs. Sure, there are lots of cheaper, one-brand surround sound systems available but their shortcomings are only revealed at home. One is that they often won't go loud enough and another is that they can sound pretty thin. It's a fact that the bulk of people buying their second home cinema spend vastly more on sound than they did first time around.

The marketing manager at importer Audio Products, Holger Pfeilmaier, has noticed this. "An increasing number of people are realising that a big screen is only part of a modern home cinema," he says. "The focus has started to shift to the other core ingredient - spectacular sound."

So $5k for the screen, $5k for the sound and 10 per cent again for the installation. Total $11,000. So how come I wound up spending more than $14,000? Well, things cropped up.

The Blu-ray player, for example. We tried three before we found one that didn't get emotional about the cabling of my system. I didn't like that one so I paid as much again to upgrade to a better-quality one that not only worked but gave a palpable improvement in both sound and vision quality.

I had to buy expensive HDMI cables because manufacturers never put them in the box, despite breathlessly declaring how many HDMI connections their product has. Should this be valuable lesson seven?

There was also the matter of my partner disliking the cabinet I'd picked and opting for something smaller (thereby doubling the number of speaker stands needed) and considerably more expensive. Which is valuable lesson eight: in all matters pertaining to aesthetics, your partner is right, you are wrong.

There was the painter and the plasterer, of course. And all that other unpredictable stuff, like the slab of beer for the painter when he went above and beyond the call, the surge protector the installer thought was a good idea and some neat conduits that look like skirting boards, which I didn't even know existed when I embarked on this odyssey.

My home cinema has now been up and running for a year, and flawlessly for the past 10 months. Valuable lesson nine: if you watch action movies late at night and have neighbours, you'll need to get some headphones.

I love, love it, love it. Even more importantly, so does my partner. And she'll love it even more when I get rid of that stack of remote controls cluttering the coffee table and replace them with a single smart remote that controls the lot.

Valuable lesson 10: No home cinema sounds as good as a happy partner.

What are your tips for

Source: smh.com.au

Ethical hacking ?!

Students learn 'ethical hacking'
Saturday, November 21, 2009 » 04:35am


Cyber attacks on businesses has led to a rapid increase in 'ethical hacking' courses at universities.


The threat of cyber attacks on businesses and governments has led to a rapid increase in the number of universities offering students the chance to learn how to hack computer networks.

The degrees have been set to feed the expanding industry of 'ethical hacking', in which companies pay hackers to infiltrate their systems and expose weaknesses.

The prospect of a lucrative career in the security services, police, defence and IT industries has fuelled the popularity in the courses, with hundreds of undergraduates and graduate students already enrolled.

The ethical hacking degree at Abertay University in Dundee was set up in 2006 and was the first of its kind in the UK.

Since then, other courses have been set up at Coventry, Northumbria and Sunderland, with more in the pipeline at Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh Napier and Leeds Metropolitan amongst others.

Colin McLean, the programme tutor in Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures at Abertay, told Sky News that teaching his students to hack networks means they will have the skills to protect banks, businesses and the critical national infrastructure against cyber attacks.

'The current people in those jobs are not protecting against hackers,' he said.

'There should be jobs for people who know exactly what hackers are doing and obviously how to stop the hackers as well.'

Critics have warned of the dangers of arming young people with knowledge that could so easily be turned to criminal endeavour.

But, according to Jennifer Higgins, a fourth year undergraduate on Abertay, the boundaries are clear.

'Take, for example, chemistry students,' she says.

'They might know all the chemicals to cause damage but that's not the sort of thing they're interested it, they're interested in putting their knowledge to the greater good.

'You're well educated on the laws and the way people detect things.'

'It's not made to seem glamorous to hack into anything, it's more about protecting the systems.'

The Government claims cyber crime costs the UK economy billions of pounds every year and recently set up its own Office for Cyber Security.

However, the increasing demand has also made ethical hacking one of the UK's fastest growing industries in the private sector.

NCC group, based in Manchester, is one of the largest firms in Europe to offer ethical hacking as one of its services, claiming to have 94 of the UK's top 100 companies amongs its clients.

Chief executive Rob Cotton said the importance of ethical hacking has yet to be fully realised.

'It's actually an arms race. It's the bad guys getting better and better and us, the good guys, trying to overcome them,' he said.

'Business is becoming more aware of it but more often than not organisations turn round and are shocked that they've been hacked.'

''Why would somebody hack us and steal our information', they say? Simple reason is information is valuable, and becoming more valuable as every day passes by.'

With both the private and public sectors increasingly dependent on networked technology, the promise of a lucrative career waging war against criminal hackers is likely to make the ethical option even more mainstream.

Robotics an interesting field

2009 space odyssey: Brisbane maps robotic futureSCOTT CASEY
November 18, 2009 - 3:10PM Be the first to comment


University of Queensland scientists are working on algorithms to help robots rapidly 'learn' about their environment.

Scientists in Brisbane are blurring the line between biology and technology and creating a new generation of robot "helpers" more in tune with human needs.

The University of Queensland is hosting the the Australian Research Council's Thinking Systems symposium this week, which brings together UQ's robotic navigation project with the University of New South Wales' robotic hands project and a speech and cognition project out of the University of Western Sydney.

Scientists are working towards a range of robotic innovations, from the development of navigation and learning robots to the construction of artificial joints and limbs and the creation of a conversational computer program, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL.

UQ's School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering head, Professor Janet Wiles, said the symposium paired "some very clever engineers...with very clever scientists" to map the future of robotics - and it was going to be a very different world.

"You're bringing together neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, behaviour and robotics information system to look at the cross disciplinary projects we can do in this space," Professor Wiles said.

"We're doing a combination of the fundamental science and the translation into the technology and that's one of the great benefits of our project."

The group aims to advance robotic technology by decoding the way human and animal brains work to equip machines with the ability to operate in the real world.

"There's a strong connection to cognition - the way the brain works as a whole - and navigation, so what we've been doing is studying the fundamental of navigation in animals and taking the algorithms we've learnt from those and putting them into robots," Professor Wiles said.

Over the next two decades, she sees robots becoming more and more important, expanding from their current roles as cleaners, assemblers and drones and into smarter machines more closely integrated with human beings in the form of replacement limbs and joints.

"It's not going to be the robots and us. Already a lot of people are incorporating robot components; people who have had a leg amputated who now have a knee and in the knee. It is effectively a fully-articulated robotic knee [with] a lot of the spring in the step that a natural knee has," Professor Wiles said.

"The ability of robots to replace component parts is an area which is going to be growing.

"This is where you're going to blur the line between technology and biology when you start to interface these two fields."

At UQ, the team is working on developing computer codes or algorithms that would enable a robot to "learn" rapidly about its near environment and navigate within it.

"Navigation is quite an intriguing skill because it is so intrinsic to what we do and we are really not aware of it unless we have a poor sense of navigation," Professor Wiles said.

"The kind of navigation we are dealing with is how you get from one place to another, right across town or from one room in a building to another you can't see."

With about four million robots in households right now, performing menial chores such as vacuuming the carpet, improvements in navigation has the potential to widen the scope of these creations to take a larger place in everyday life.

According to Professor Wiles, the ability to rapidly process information and apply it to the area they are working in will give robots the edge into the future.

"Robots need to learn new environments very rapidly and that's what a lot of our work focuses on.

"When you take a robot out of the box you don't want to program into it with the architecture of your house, you want the robot to explore the house and learn it very quickly," Professor Wiles said.

"Household robotics is going to be really big in the next 15 years or so and this is one of the things you need is for robots to be able to look after themselves in space."

But as Australian universities and international research institutes look into replicating the individual parts of biological creatures and mimic them in machines, the question of intelligence inevitably become more important.

While the sometimes frightening scenarios played out in science fiction novels and films - where so often robots lay waste to humanity - remains securely in the realm of fantasy, Professor Wiles believes that some day machines will think like us.

"There's strong AI [artificial intelligence] and weak AI. Strong AI says there will be artificially intelligent creatures which are not biological. Weak AI says they will have a lot of the algorithms and they do already have a lot of those algorithms," she said.

"The bee, whose brain is a tiny as a sesame seed, already has better navigation abilities than even our best robots.

"So we have a little way to go before robots reach biological intelligence let alone human intelligence but I don't see why we shouldn't take steps towards it."

The ARC Thinking Systems symposium continues at the University of Queensland in St Lucia today.

brisbanetimes.com.au


Source: brisbanetimes.com.au

Thats powerful can u believe it?

Japan eyes solar station in space as new energy source

November 9, 2009 - 8:26PM
It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.

The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.

With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.

But Japan's boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), in which arrays of photovoltaic dishes several square kilometres (square miles) in size would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere.

"Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source, we believe that this system will be able to help solve the problems of energy shortage and global warming," researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the project participants, wrote in a report.

"The sun's rays abound in space."

The solar cells would capture the solar energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves.

These would be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, likely to be located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs, said Tadashige Takiya, a spokesman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The researchers are targeting a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized atomic power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than its current cost in Japan.

The challenge - including transporting the components to space - may appear gigantic, but Japan has been pursuing the project since 1998, with some 130 researchers studying it under JAXA's oversight.

Last month Japan's Economy and Trade Ministry and the Science Ministry took another step toward making the project a reality, by selecting several Japanese high-tech giants as participants in the project.

The consortium, named the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer, also includes Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp.

The project's roadmap outlined several steps that would need to be taken before a full-blown launch in 2030.

Within several years, "a satellite designed to test the transmission by microwave should be put into low orbit with a Japanese rocket," said Tatsuhito Fujita, one of the JAXA researchers heading the project.

The next step, expected around 2020, would be to launch and test a large flexible photovoltaic structure with 10 megawatt power capacity, to be followed by a 250 megawatt prototype.

This would help evaluate the project's financial viability, say officials. The final aim is to produce electricity cheap enough to compete with other alternative energy sources.

JAXA says the transmission technology would be safe but concedes it would have to convince the public, which may harbour images of laser beams shooting down from the sky, roasting birds or slicing up aircraft in mid-air.

According to a 2004 study by JAXA, the words 'laser' and 'microwave' caused the most concern among the 1000 people questioned.