Remember GM's ad campaign for one of their SUVs where they let people make commercials, supply the text for overlays, etc?
The runaway hit was prophetic in oh so many ways. People made ads forecasting GM going out of business due to their reliance on gas-guzzling monster vehicles, the lack of quality, the damage to the environment, etc. One of the best ones was about taking your kids out to see the environment they were destroying.
Instead of dismissing all of the anti-GM and anti-SUV ads, they should have bought a clue and immediately started revamping their product line.
I don't know if there is an archive of those ads somewhere, but a lot of them were very good.
I think the government tying themselves to any contractor and using leased apps is a bad idea. It will eventually back them into a corner and they will be looking at more huge costs to migrate to something else.
I think Open Source software is the only course right now. If there are going to be conversion costs, spend them to migrate to software that doesn't cost out the wazoo or that ties you to any single vendor. There will be support costs no matter which path they take, but getting away from proprietary applications and operating systems should be a priority.
Continuing to use Microsoft products is the biggest mistake possible. The fact is that with Microsoft Windows, we might as well run telnet on every networked system with user name guest and password guest.
I had a similar experience with the mail part of my subscription. Unfortunately, the post office where I live has a well-earned reputation for being unreliable.
I had DVDs arrive late, not at all, and had Netflix not receive DVDs back. I cancelled my account with Netflix so I could avoid having them cancel it for me due to too many lost DVDs.
I contacted the postal inspectors to see if complaints would help and they seem to have. Eventually all of the DVDs made it to their destinations and I decided to risk re-upping my subscription. I also had a new person in my neighborhood bring a DVD that had been misdelivered to what had been an empty mailbox.
The post office, at least where I live, has been having problems with missing mail and shoddy delivery. My wife had a registered letter just get left in the curbside mailbox without being signed for - which is a violation of Federal regulations. Mail with tracking would be misdelivered and show up about a month late. It's really bad at least here.
I can understand why merchants, utilities, and Netflix would want to switch to Internet options for bill pay and service delivery. It avoids a lot of problems, missed payments, lost shipments, etc. I try to never have anything delivered by mail carrier and pay as many bills as possible via online methods.
I think the post office has given people sufficient reason to avoid using them and I hear the same thing from lots of other people. Certainly not all mail carriers do crappy jobs, but enough do that I would expect their mail load to continue to move more to junk mail (which I really don't care to receive anyway) and cause rates to continue up - providing yet another reason for people and businesses to abandon the U.S. Mail.
Sharks can't fly, though, and they would have to be smart enough to aim taking into account the refractive index difference between the seawater and the air.
Maybe if we used flying fish with frickin' lasers strapped to their heads...
See the other topic about WiFi and mandated logs. There is a new law proposed that will force everyone with a WiFi access point to keep records for two years.
Granted there may be lots of problems with the implementation, but it will make an NWCN more difficult if it comes to be.
I know those numbers don't quite add up. I have seen the quality "dots" drop down when launching a show so the 1.3 Mbps numbers might also represent a lower quality image than HD.
I run with a DSL connection and a Roku Netflix player.
I can monitor bandwidth on my router (Tomato firmware on a Linksys router) and I originally was signed up for 1.5 Mbps download / 678 kbs upload service tier from Qwest. Testing against www.speakeasy.net/speedtest always showed pretty close to 1.5 rated speeds.
When I hooked up the Roku, I monitored bandwidth to see how much I was using and the stream was holding a fairly constant 1.3 Mbps download rate during an HD movie.
As I noted above, I wanted a little more headroom so switched to 7 Mbps download DSL service tier and now, while the average download speed is still around 1.3 Mbps, the usage shows peaks to around 5-6 Mbps for about ten seconds then about 30 or so seconds of nothing.
As an aside, Star Trek season 1 in HD over the Roku is amazing! I've never seen it look this good before.
Regarding not needing cable, I recently updated my Roku firmware and it mentioned that Amazon was going to also be streaming through the Roku and they were going to be streaming network TV as well.
From the Roku "What's New" menu page:
By now you've noticed our new Home screen. This screen will become your launching pad for a number of great new channels that will begin to appear on your player in early 2009. In addition to the hugely popular Netflix channel, you'll see new movie channels, TV channels, web video channels and more!
We've also upgraded your player to support an advanced video format that will deliver better video quality, especially over slower Internet connections.
Finally, your player is now fully HD capable. If you have an HDTV, select "update display type" below to get the full HD experience. (Tip: visit www.netflix.com/instantHD for HD movies from Netflix.)
I don't remember where I saw it - probably somewhere when I was researching the Roku player - but there was something about the reason NetFlix didn't have the newest releases was due to noncompete in their contracts. The DVD/studio people want time to market the DVDs to consumers.
With pay per view and DVD rentals, there is apparently a payment made that keeps them happy. I don't know if that is currently true with the stuff NetFlix streams. What they offer on streaming might be pretty similar to what is made available through broadcast TV.
I could see this as an opportunity for NetFlix to offer a tiered subscription, though. Free streaming of older, less mainstream stuff, and then pay a higher subscription price for the same stuff they mail out on DVDs. Maybe they are waiting on a sufficiently large installed base of NetFlix streaming compatible players.
Not to malign what they offer through streaming - I am a long way from running out of movies and such that I want to see that are already available.
I have the Roku player and pipe it into a Sony HDTV. It looks beautiful on most Netflix offerings.
Even with the HD offerings, though, the quality isn't as good as a DVD in my upconverting DVD player but it is better than non-digital cable or broadcast.
I love my Roku player and it's probably the best $100 I've spend on entertainment. I've also been watching the various TV series (Star Trek is in HD too), lots of documentaries (History Channel, PBS, etc) and some movies. It is certainly easily watchable.
There are some artifacts in the images, though, especially when the screen is mostly one color or shade - you will see the digitization as blockiness. But that's generally not an issue and easily overlooked for the kind of viewing I use the Roku for.
I have the single DVD but unlimited tradeouts (which gets me free streaming), and anything I want to see in really high quality, I just get as a mailed DVD. I can wait a day or two.
Other than that, the only other issue I've seen is on Saturday evenings, the image quality can go down a little but I think that is due to heavy load on the NetFlix servers or through network choke points near them.
As an aside, I started out with the Roku on a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection through Qwest. During movies, the load held fairly constant at about 1.3 Mbps. With so little headroom, and since I've been pining for faster speeds anyway, I upgraded my service to 7 Mbps. Now, instead of a constant 1.3 Mbps, I see pulses of download traffic up to around 5-6 Mbps and then periods of no activity in between. The average still comes out around 1.3 Mbps.
But I have no problem recommending streaming NetFlix and I love the little Roku player.
How do you set the bit rate? I haven't seen it in the Roku menus. I have set my screen type which I am sure would affect bit rate. Is that what you mean or is this on a different player?
True. You could do this. But then you get all of those stupid checks that can draw on your account mailed to an address where you don't get mail. Even worse, guess where they will send your replacement card...
I think what mabhatter is referring to is claiming no dependents on withholding so more gets taken out each paycheck - hopefully making it where he/she has to write no check or at least a small check come tax time.
If mab claimed one dependent, less would be withheld making for a significantly larger check to be written to the state. That's a great strategy when you have other deductions that guarantee you a refund since you have more money each month and can make it work for you instead of letting the state/fed make it work for them.
Things are really screwed up these days and Kansas has even suspended sending out tax refunds in an effort to meet payroll.
You have to wonder what Kansas' response would be to people who put off writing that tax check in order to have enough funds to make rent or a house payment...
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In the CNet report, they only mention DHCP. Obviously, if they only legislate DHCP everyone will go to static addresses until those logs have to be kept too.
But how can they enforce this? Will they require people to routinely submit logs so they can keep tabs on you? Will they require everyone with WiFi to register their routers like it was a gun so that law enforcement will be able to know who might need to be rounded up? Will it be a crime to change your MAC address or spoof it?
I think this is going to end up just being another waste of time. I even wonder if Congress would know how to write a law that would include the proper text to cover something as technical as logs. Will they have to be supplied pre-filtered or in original format? What if they are so verbose that 2 years worth can't be burned to a CD or DVD? Will they supply the media to copy the logs off? And what if you have a data loss? If your logs get wiped out in a disk failure, what kind of penalty will go with that? Will we be required to RAID our log storage to protect the data? What about offsite backups? Will we have to backup logs to some government server?
How about if you are doing remote logging and accidentally block tcp 514 so you have a hole in your data? What if your logging daemon dies and nothing gets logged until you discover/reboot/restart?
I think this is impractical. I think it will be able to be circumvented. I think it will just be another way to do what the Chinese have been doing to their people - monitor them.
Might be a good time to start up a network installation business to install wired connections in homes and businesses. I think people would much rather hardwire than put up with this bull about WiFi logs. Any builders would probably want to run Ethernet everywhere as a matter of course in new construction.
And if they only specify WiFi, look for optical to start taking off.
This is what happens when people who think the "Internets" is a bunch of tubes start wanting to control technology that they don't understand.
I would bet the admin realizes this all too well now.
I can't believe anyone would run a commercial system without backing things up. Hell, even home users, if they have anything of value, need to do backups.
It's just not that hard these days especially with cheap NAS boxes, low-cost hard drives, etc.
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Remember GM's ad campaign for one of their SUVs where they let people make commercials, supply the text for overlays, etc?
The runaway hit was prophetic in oh so many ways. People made ads forecasting GM going out of business due to their reliance on gas-guzzling monster vehicles, the lack of quality, the damage to the environment, etc. One of the best ones was about taking your kids out to see the environment they were destroying.
Instead of dismissing all of the anti-GM and anti-SUV ads, they should have bought a clue and immediately started revamping their product line.
I don't know if there is an archive of those ads somewhere, but a lot of them were very good.
I don't.
I think the government tying themselves to any contractor and using leased apps is a bad idea. It will eventually back them into a corner and they will be looking at more huge costs to migrate to something else.
I think Open Source software is the only course right now. If there are going to be conversion costs, spend them to migrate to software that doesn't cost out the wazoo or that ties you to any single vendor. There will be support costs no matter which path they take, but getting away from proprietary applications and operating systems should be a priority.
Continuing to use Microsoft products is the biggest mistake possible. The fact is that with Microsoft Windows, we might as well run telnet on every networked system with user name guest and password guest.
"So, not only is there a pound of that stuff in the earth, but it is ALWAYS there. As soon as you take it away - BAM - another pound."
What you are implying is that promethium is the result of a process subject to equilibrium processes. Radioactive decay is not an equilibrium process.
I have no idea the natural abundance of promethium, but if you take away a pound of promethium, there is no "BAM - another pound".
I had a similar experience with the mail part of my subscription. Unfortunately, the post office where I live has a well-earned reputation for being unreliable.
I had DVDs arrive late, not at all, and had Netflix not receive DVDs back. I cancelled my account with Netflix so I could avoid having them cancel it for me due to too many lost DVDs.
I contacted the postal inspectors to see if complaints would help and they seem to have. Eventually all of the DVDs made it to their destinations and I decided to risk re-upping my subscription. I also had a new person in my neighborhood bring a DVD that had been misdelivered to what had been an empty mailbox.
The post office, at least where I live, has been having problems with missing mail and shoddy delivery. My wife had a registered letter just get left in the curbside mailbox without being signed for - which is a violation of Federal regulations. Mail with tracking would be misdelivered and show up about a month late. It's really bad at least here.
I can understand why merchants, utilities, and Netflix would want to switch to Internet options for bill pay and service delivery. It avoids a lot of problems, missed payments, lost shipments, etc. I try to never have anything delivered by mail carrier and pay as many bills as possible via online methods.
I think the post office has given people sufficient reason to avoid using them and I hear the same thing from lots of other people. Certainly not all mail carriers do crappy jobs, but enough do that I would expect their mail load to continue to move more to junk mail (which I really don't care to receive anyway) and cause rates to continue up - providing yet another reason for people and businesses to abandon the U.S. Mail.
Sharks can't fly, though, and they would have to be smart enough to aim taking into account the refractive index difference between the seawater and the air.
Maybe if we used flying fish with frickin' lasers strapped to their heads...
See the other topic about WiFi and mandated logs. There is a new law proposed that will force everyone with a WiFi access point to keep records for two years.
Granted there may be lots of problems with the implementation, but it will make an NWCN more difficult if it comes to be.
I know those numbers don't quite add up. I have seen the quality "dots" drop down when launching a show so the 1.3 Mbps numbers might also represent a lower quality image than HD.
I run with a DSL connection and a Roku Netflix player.
I can monitor bandwidth on my router (Tomato firmware on a Linksys router) and I originally was signed up for 1.5 Mbps download / 678 kbs upload service tier from Qwest. Testing against www.speakeasy.net/speedtest always showed pretty close to 1.5 rated speeds.
When I hooked up the Roku, I monitored bandwidth to see how much I was using and the stream was holding a fairly constant 1.3 Mbps download rate during an HD movie.
As I noted above, I wanted a little more headroom so switched to 7 Mbps download DSL service tier and now, while the average download speed is still around 1.3 Mbps, the usage shows peaks to around 5-6 Mbps for about ten seconds then about 30 or so seconds of nothing.
As an aside, Star Trek season 1 in HD over the Roku is amazing! I've never seen it look this good before.
Regarding not needing cable, I recently updated my Roku firmware and it mentioned that Amazon was going to also be streaming through the Roku and they were going to be streaming network TV as well.
From the Roku "What's New" menu page:
By now you've noticed our new Home screen. This screen will become your launching pad for a number of great new channels that will begin to appear on your player in early 2009. In addition to the hugely popular Netflix channel, you'll see new movie channels, TV channels, web video channels and more!
We've also upgraded your player to support an advanced video format that will deliver better video quality, especially over slower Internet connections.
Finally, your player is now fully HD capable. If you have an HDTV, select "update display type" below to get the full HD experience. (Tip: visit www.netflix.com/instantHD for HD movies from Netflix.)
I don't remember where I saw it - probably somewhere when I was researching the Roku player - but there was something about the reason NetFlix didn't have the newest releases was due to noncompete in their contracts. The DVD/studio people want time to market the DVDs to consumers.
With pay per view and DVD rentals, there is apparently a payment made that keeps them happy. I don't know if that is currently true with the stuff NetFlix streams. What they offer on streaming might be pretty similar to what is made available through broadcast TV.
I could see this as an opportunity for NetFlix to offer a tiered subscription, though. Free streaming of older, less mainstream stuff, and then pay a higher subscription price for the same stuff they mail out on DVDs. Maybe they are waiting on a sufficiently large installed base of NetFlix streaming compatible players.
Not to malign what they offer through streaming - I am a long way from running out of movies and such that I want to see that are already available.
I have the Roku player and pipe it into a Sony HDTV. It looks beautiful on most Netflix offerings.
Even with the HD offerings, though, the quality isn't as good as a DVD in my upconverting DVD player but it is better than non-digital cable or broadcast.
I love my Roku player and it's probably the best $100 I've spend on entertainment. I've also been watching the various TV series (Star Trek is in HD too), lots of documentaries (History Channel, PBS, etc) and some movies. It is certainly easily watchable.
There are some artifacts in the images, though, especially when the screen is mostly one color or shade - you will see the digitization as blockiness. But that's generally not an issue and easily overlooked for the kind of viewing I use the Roku for.
I have the single DVD but unlimited tradeouts (which gets me free streaming), and anything I want to see in really high quality, I just get as a mailed DVD. I can wait a day or two.
Other than that, the only other issue I've seen is on Saturday evenings, the image quality can go down a little but I think that is due to heavy load on the NetFlix servers or through network choke points near them.
As an aside, I started out with the Roku on a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection through Qwest. During movies, the load held fairly constant at about 1.3 Mbps. With so little headroom, and since I've been pining for faster speeds anyway, I upgraded my service to 7 Mbps. Now, instead of a constant 1.3 Mbps, I see pulses of download traffic up to around 5-6 Mbps and then periods of no activity in between. The average still comes out around 1.3 Mbps.
But I have no problem recommending streaming NetFlix and I love the little Roku player.
How do you set the bit rate? I haven't seen it in the Roku menus. I have set my screen type which I am sure would affect bit rate. Is that what you mean or is this on a different player?
True. You could do this. But then you get all of those stupid checks that can draw on your account mailed to an address where you don't get mail. Even worse, guess where they will send your replacement card...
Sorry - peragrin, not mabhatter...
I think what mabhatter is referring to is claiming no dependents on withholding so more gets taken out each paycheck - hopefully making it where he/she has to write no check or at least a small check come tax time.
If mab claimed one dependent, less would be withheld making for a significantly larger check to be written to the state. That's a great strategy when you have other deductions that guarantee you a refund since you have more money each month and can make it work for you instead of letting the state/fed make it work for them.
Things are really screwed up these days and Kansas has even suspended sending out tax refunds in an effort to meet payroll.
You have to wonder what Kansas' response would be to people who put off writing that tax check in order to have enough funds to make rent or a house payment...
But on credit card purchases, in order to combat fraud, a lot of vendors are requiring billing address and "shipping address" to match.
And your Linux since it isn't a purchase. ;-)
Maybe it could even be a disability?
There are right angles everywhere and a good phobia of them could keep us in our parent's basements and unable to work.
Maybe even a reason to go for lost wages?
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In the CNet report, they only mention DHCP. Obviously, if they only legislate DHCP everyone will go to static addresses until those logs have to be kept too.
But how can they enforce this? Will they require people to routinely submit logs so they can keep tabs on you? Will they require everyone with WiFi to register their routers like it was a gun so that law enforcement will be able to know who might need to be rounded up? Will it be a crime to change your MAC address or spoof it?
I think this is going to end up just being another waste of time. I even wonder if Congress would know how to write a law that would include the proper text to cover something as technical as logs. Will they have to be supplied pre-filtered or in original format? What if they are so verbose that 2 years worth can't be burned to a CD or DVD? Will they supply the media to copy the logs off? And what if you have a data loss? If your logs get wiped out in a disk failure, what kind of penalty will go with that? Will we be required to RAID our log storage to protect the data? What about offsite backups? Will we have to backup logs to some government server?
How about if you are doing remote logging and accidentally block tcp 514 so you have a hole in your data? What if your logging daemon dies and nothing gets logged until you discover/reboot/restart?
I think this is impractical. I think it will be able to be circumvented. I think it will just be another way to do what the Chinese have been doing to their people - monitor them.
Might be a good time to start up a network installation business to install wired connections in homes and businesses. I think people would much rather hardwire than put up with this bull about WiFi logs. Any builders would probably want to run Ethernet everywhere as a matter of course in new construction.
And if they only specify WiFi, look for optical to start taking off.
This is what happens when people who think the "Internets" is a bunch of tubes start wanting to control technology that they don't understand.
I wonder how many people will get that. At least one did that had mod points.
Good show!
I would bet the admin realizes this all too well now.
I can't believe anyone would run a commercial system without backing things up. Hell, even home users, if they have anything of value, need to do backups.
It's just not that hard these days especially with cheap NAS boxes, low-cost hard drives, etc.
She'll be less likely to use it as a phone when it smells like ass.
Some people will even pay to get a good spanking... ;-)
I would also agree with that it's overreacting.
Maybe the OP should include a cover letter that mentions this and provides a quick and easy way to verify it wasn't him.
Sure, it will be a little inconvenient, but it's a lot better than trying outrank a search ranking, etc.
Who pissed in your Cheerios?
I took the original post as sarcastic until the OP came back and said the idea has merit.
And who cares if I gave a rational answer to a sarcastic post?
Oh wait - you do. Sorry. You can have my first born to sacrifice at the altar of the BBS police.