In message <017501c653db$a474a950$d201a8c0@y2k> Russell McMahon wrote: > The Optus B1 satellite which provides "Sky TV" services to NZ is > "down" and all Sky channels have been displayed an "temporary outage > due to rain" for some hours now. No big deal, perhaps, but they lost > their backup "Satellite Control Processor" in May 2005 and promptly > swapped to the secondary processor, which it is now running on, or > was. There's only 2 per Optus satellite AFAIK. "Lord have mercy, thine satellite is deceased!" "Lo, doest thou not have backups?" "Nay squire, the backup is missing!" Cue "Another one bites the dust" by Queen... :D > B1's been running since 1992 and is well past its use by date. A > replacement is due "this year". Looks like we may be saving money for > a while here :-) ISTR the old Astra sats that used to run the UK Sky analogue service (ASTRA 1A through 1D iirc) are still up - some of those are well past their estimated lifetime. Same goes for the old BSB satellites (Marcopolo 1 and 2, though they got renamed when BSB went under and sold the sats - they're called Thor and Sirius now iirc). I've been meaning to get an 802.11g WAP and set up some form of wireless IP-TV system, just for grins. VideoLAN serving the video, IP Multicasting to keep the bandwidth down, not sure about compression though (would need to find something that could encode in realtime on my Athlon64 box). Could be fun :) -- Phil. | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G ViewFinder philpem@dsl.pipex.com | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 512M+100G http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+40G -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist