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+2 Funny/Insightful. Thank you. I was actually a bit surprised that nobody else commented on that. I mean, Hank! Seems it's true that /. readers are too young

Radio was able to delivery nationwide coverage from pretty much the beginning. See this announcement of the creation of NBC, which, as the name suggests, was intended to be nationwide--http://www.ipass.net/~whitetho/1926nbc .htm. There were also rogue "superpower" stations that could reach most of the country, until regulators stopped them (or forced them across the border). Technology wasn't the primary obstacle--we have local broadcasting because the FCC considered that a virtue.

BS about how "Market Forces" and other blah-blah crud would simply be much better than government regulations regarding communications, would have left us with a wasteland of commmunications devices that simply wouldn't be able to communicate.

"In the United States the use of wireless initially was unregulated -- anyone could operate a radio transmitter anywhere, at any time, on any wavelength. And most utilized the longwave signals that traveled so well across land and sea. Naturally severe interference occurred with everyone trying to use the same wavelengths."

Try here for one version of this story.
Gotta love Google.

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

I was in Sapporo last fall and had little difficulty dialing up locally. I got an account from Ipass.net which provided me with dialup in every Japanese city I visited. If you buy an account from them, they have a little software tool which provides you with a list of access numbers for wherever you happen to be. It's worldwide, not just Japan. I did have to spend a little time playing with the phone numbers -- deleting unneccessary area codes, etc. But once I hit the phone number right, the service was great.

Japan is very computer-friendly. All the hotel rooms have a phone jack for computer, and all of the pay phones have 2 jacks, one for modem and one for ISDN.

I personally expect the whole IT-industry stocks to implode, but that is no specific linux problem.

thought this would be a good point to interject this, from US Early Radio History:

It took many years before radio's financial returns would match its great potential. In the United States, this resulted in a series of companies which sold stock at vastly inflated prices, backed mostly by vastly inflated visions of the companies' prospects. Frank Fayant was in the middle of a multi-part series about stock fraud -- Fools and Their Money -- when he stumbled across the shenanigans going on in radio stocks. The result was a two-part exposé, The Wireless Telegraph Bubble, which details the sorry state of much of the U.S. radio industry during its first decade--Fools and Their Money/The Wireless Telegraph Bubble, Success Magazine, January, 1907 through July, 1907. However, in spite of Fayant's articles, the fraudulent practices would actually accelerate.

And like I mentioned there's all these aging "baby boomers" socking away retirement money and it has to be invested somewhere. The emphasis should be on "it took many years" - look at how long it took msft to get where they are - those in for the long haul will make out, while the "get in/get out" superficial jump-on-the-latest fad & bandwagon crowd will, well, a few might make it and most won't.

Agent 32

Take a look here for a complete history of the broadcast call signs in the U.S.


...phil

I have a FreeBSD system here with multiple BrookTree cards in it, and it works pretty well. Amancio Hasty and Randall Hopper did a lot of good work on making the Bt848 and 878 boards work for nearly anything you want. (Nearly any Hauppauge board, or most mainstream PCI 'TV' boards)

There are a few applications out there in the FreeBSD Ports collection for taking the output of one of these cards and doing useful things with it. One in particular is fxtv.

I wrote a tiny little program based on how fxtv grabs the frames to just update a .jpg every 30 seconds, and keep a history of the last 10 frames, and it works great for a webcam of this nature. There's really no reason you can't have as many of them as you have PCI slots.

Another option is to grab one of these from the Walmart Online site, that was mentioned in a story a few days ago on here. A sequencer like this will take 8 inputs, and cycle through all of them. Somehow time your webcam grabs to the cycle speed, and you could get by with only one digitizer card.