BBC Stuxnet programme (OT)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Whoosh to both of you...

[Vir Campestris]

It's quite difficult to infect a PROM with malware. The device can't write to it.

And there were a few viruses around back then - spread on floppies mostly.

Andy

[whisky-dave]

I'd heard at my local hospital that they were being stolen by some eastern euopeans and drank as an alchol substitute.

[Johnny B Good]

Or those who simply want an answer to the question,

"Just how old *is this* programme, anyway?"

Knowing the answer to *that* question is particularly useful when hoovering up, for example, "Horizon" and "Natural World" BBC4 repeats from the Beeb's Iplayer servers using get_iplayer so as to 'refresh' the existing archive of the original 720 by 576 SD broadcasts with 1280 by

720 'nearly HD' iplayer versions.

Unfortunately, the 1280 by 720 standard isn't universally applied to iplayer content, sometimes being spoilt by the use of the oddball 960 by

540 resolution option ("Dad's Army" and "Reel History" being just two of the many programmes to suffer this indignity).

[whisky-dave]

Usually in roman numeralstoo.

Isn;t that because they are the old aspect ration of 3:2 . I've seen such program streach to widescreen and they lok crap and it's eas y to see the distortion when they try to streach it to 16:9 or 16:10

[Johnny B Good]

I've gotten pretty adept at deciphering them, what with all the practice I've had over the past decade or so that I've been recording Freeview broadcasts. :-)

They use non-square pixels with the video metadata set to produce a 16:9 AR frame, even with 4:3 AR material such as "Dad's Army" when they simply pillar box it into the required 4:3 AR window.

I'm still recording the SD Freeview broadcasts since there's no guarantee of iPlayer availability. This provides both a reference and a 'safety recording'. This means I can compare the quality between the Freeview 720 by 576 and the iPlayer 960 by 540 Pillar boxed versions of such 4:3 AR material. Since there's almost no discernible difference in video quality, I tend to use the iPlayer 960 by 540 versions since they very rarely suffer from end credit vandalism. The only downside to this choice is the reduction of vertical resolution from typically 572 lines down to 540 lines which in theory would compromise the quality but in practice doesn't appear to do so.

Since the original scan line count is a bit of an unknown, along with the efficacy of the conversion processes used to convert to the 576 and

540 line output formats, it's quite possible that the smaller 540 line picture is actually the better of the two options (but not by much). I've never been able to arrive at any conclusion as to which is the better from a video quality point of view, hence my electing to to opt for the 960 by 540 option to avoid end credit vandalism.

[newshound]

I agree completely. But it won't have much bandwidth so I would generally expect it to be restricted to that sort of not particularly "sensitive" application. It could change, of course.

I believe that at one time there wasn't much bandwidth in the secure communications to nuclear subs, but I bet there was plenty of security elsewhere in the chain!

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , newshound escribió:

Understatement of the century :)