People do unwittingly broadcast cable TV, by hooking up thier rooftop antenna to the same coax system in some way.
Yes, that is a possibility. Though, why would they want to have air signals as well as cable? Usually cable carries all local air signals already, and if you are aiming at remote transmitters then you use antenna amplifier, and that isolates the antenna.
If you have the wrong combination of splitters, signal amplifiers, and unshielded cables, then you're actually broadcasting the cable signal.
Nonsense.
You don't have any signal amplifiers, and what "unshielded cables" you are talking about? Coax cable is shielded.
What one could possibly do is to use a reflectometer to measure where the signal reflects off of irregularities in the line. Unterminated coax connector would reflect everything; a connected TV would absorb everything and reflect nothing. However this is far from being reliable, and is very laborous, and depends on who installed the cable and when and how, and so on... It is much cheaper to just go on with your life and sell more cable packages to someone who pays, rather than chasing ghosts of people who don't want to pay and are skilled enough to get away with that.
On a different note, there is nothing to watch on cable anyway. Why would anyone want one?
"They" are within their rights to package whatever they want - GPLed or BSD, or XFree... so there can be no complaints about that.
But if they don't provide binary distribution to a "common man", for free, then that common man is not going to buy their distribution at work, and is not going to recommend it to anyone. If they are crazy enough to believe that they can sell UL directly to a PHB bypassing PHB's own engineers, they live in a fantasy world. I personally control and dictate use of all open-sourced software in the company; good luck with your UL distro here.
That logic only works when there are no real competitors
... or when there is no big difference between competitors. If all HDD makers are equally bad, what do you do? HDD business is not something you or me can start in a garage.
Jucius: HDD MANUFACTURERS ARE YOU LISTENING? - I am willing to pay $50-100 extra for a drive with a seven year warranty
HDD Manufacturers: No, Jucius, we'd rather prefer that your drive fails twice during 7 year period, and you have to buy two replacements instead. This way we will collect not $100 that you offered, but $500 or more, depending on how big the drive is, and we are not liable for anything.
This way they still have the option of "charging people for exceeding ridiculously low monthly bandwidth caps". You can {have,eat} the cake, after all.
I am yet to see one of my tapes degrade;-) Of course, if you plan to watch some movie 100 times, then probably you'd want to rip it in SVCD or Divx.
it isn't random access
Movies are usually watched from start to finish;-) It is not that hard to fast-forward +4 hours (there is a counter, you know), it just takes 2 minutes, and then you watch the movie...
eight hours' unattended recording isn't that impressive (even if you manage to find one that doesn't eat eight-hour tapes)
The goal is not to impress. The goal is to serve. What do you mean "eat tapes", BTW? None of modern VCRs (made in last 10 years) will damage the 8 hour tape; it's pretty much the same tape, only more of it.
WRT digital VCR, you already can make one with any frame grabber card and ffmpeg program.
does anyone think we'll reach a limit to the amount of data we'll need as individuals?
Universe is infinite, probably. There would be no limit. To start with, I wouldn't mind having a local copy of a map of Earth, with resolution to 1cm, in 3D, so that I can "travel" in virtual reality. After that, I'd like to have the same for the sky (astronomy) and nearby planets... Other people could instead prefer a library of all the books, paintings, sculptures, music, photos and movies ever produced, and special publications - as super-detailed images.
It hurts to read. The article is written backwards, in most convoluted sentences possible. Could we please be somehow warned NOT to read it?
There is nothing to read, and there is nothing to discuss anyway (besides the standard grammatical challenges). The horrible "reporting" (if I may call it that) does not deserve reading, linking or even the IP traffic.
For somebody who seems to want his entertainment for free or very little cost, you sure do bitch a lot about commercials. You can't have it both ways, man.
Sure he can. It's his business proposal to TV networks. He watches what he wants, and they don't ad-spam him. Well, if TV moguls don't like his offer, they can take a hike. Business works both ways.
oes this mean you're going to stop using the Internet too? Spending your whole life dodging advertising [...]
Properly installed Junkbuster removes all advertising from Internet, especially if used with Mozilla. Of course, it all depends on the use of Internet; if you do scientific research you are OK; if you seek entertainment, Junkbuster will break most of those Web sites.
On another note: You say "dodging advertising". I don't "dodge" ads, I hunt them. I am the only person responsible for my browser setup, and I configure it as I wish. If I don't like something in the world, I fix it. Sadly, many people all too readily look for sand to stick their head into.
I have a non-Tivo PVR that does not have a monthly fee and does not spy on my TV viewing habits.
It is probably called a VCR.
Another advantage of a VHS recorder is that I can buy as many 8-hour tapes as I want, as close as in a nearest drug store. This way I am not limited to 40 hours, 80 hours or whatever. This is important if you are busy now but expect to watch the show at a later time, maybe in few months... and all any of these tapes can be played on any VHS VCR.
The only reason to use Tivo is to use their subscription. But given less and less worthy TV shows with each year, is it that difficult to program the VCR to tape Cartoon Networks from 9:30pm to 1am each Saturday night?
StarOffice comes with different bugs. Live with it.
I do, personally. I can use anything, from TeX to Quark Express. That's the "users" who refuse.
You see, I am just tired of getting accused again and again of "sabotaging our company" and "slowing down the document preparation". Valid or not, these are exactly the arguments flying around. What would *you* do if you are daily accused of harming your company and your coworkers? They all say "Word is perfect, SO is a POS." I say "Ok, then use Word but don't complain to me when it fails on you". We shall see how soon they find out that Word is much more primitive than SO.
MPAA does not want to know that such "universal" watermark recognition technology does not work even on super-powerful desktops! There is simply no way to make it work on a commodity 50-cent chip. A/D converters are not CPUs and not DSPs, and they don't have any memory inside. They are just a comparator, a counter and few logic gates.
This technology is beyond Star Trek. Hell, it is even beyond capabilities of most humans (who are most adaptive computers on the planet so far, that we know of.) If I were to sit in a chip, how would I know legal status of the work and of the recording? And what if the legal status changed after the recording was made? And what if the recording is done with permission? And what... -- forget it.
It makes a great deal more sense to take a format that 95% of people are using and make it the standard than to create one.
Sure, if the binary Word format can be ever documented.
But you don't need to go that far. All open-source wordprocessors read RTF, and all Word versions cheerfully write RTF. Is it of use? Not really, because wordprocessors themselves fail to make good use of the tagged data. You get the text, but lose layout (I don't even mention embedded objects, graphics, rarely used WordArt etc.)
As I said before, the only wordprocessor which can correctly open MS Word documents is MS Word itself, because every little bug and every little typo in its code affects the layout.
Of course, if I were the dictator (copyright honors go to W), I would just mandate use of HTML and PostScript everywhere. Good or bad - does not matter, it would do the job, and compatibility would be a greater good than loss of minor conveniences here and there.
dependence on tools like Word will keep businesses enslaved by Microsoft. For businesses to consider moving to Linux, they need to be able to take documents with them.
It might be not possible, in near future. Here is a real life example, less than a week old. I insisted on using StarOffice 5.2 to prepare a user's manual. This is not too fancy document with some simple illustrations, some text and few indexes, total about 20 pages. Result? Total failure. Here is why.
SO 5.2 actually works, in 99% of cases. But it is not good enough. I thought that the user will scream and whine forever about different buttons and different menus. Well, it stopped after a while, and he got used to the new software. This appears to be only a small problem.
The real killer problem is reliability. MS Word had more than 10 years of debugging, it is fairly stable now. SO 5.2 is not. We discovered so many obscure little bugs that by now the decision to migrate StarOffice documents to MS Word is pretty much a done deal. Among those bugs:
Broken spell checker (on Windows)
Incorrect kerning on some zooms
Too hungry deletion of highlighted text
Hangup/Crash if another window gets focused
Broken "to right margin" checkbox in some cases in index styles
Very weird flow control
Anchoring frames to paragraphs does not reflow
Two indexes weld to each other, Backspace causes lockup and crash
... many more, I don't even remember.
The point here is that businesses need reliable, robust, bulletproof wordprocessor. A secretary or a CEO don't want to see obscure dialogs. Can SO and OO get there? Sure. But it will take time, lots of it. MS used its time very wisely, and got a very strong foothold. And anyone who says "Businesses just need bold and italics" are mistaken. Businesses need all features - because technical documents are often very complex and have a maze of page styles. Your suggestion that small formatting loss is OK is not acceptable. Well, you can sell that to me, and I can sell that to you - but neither of us will convince our coworkers that they should come to work on weekends and fix conversion bugs.
So you said dependence on tools like Word will keep businesses enslaved by Microsoft. True, but most businesses don't understand that, and they don't care either. They won't migrate to anything just because it is marginally cheaper.
IMO, the way of liberating our documents is in gradual migration from Office formats to open formats and open applications. Look how Ogg Vorbis slowly but surely enters the MP3 world. Still 99% of all songs are in MP3, but more and more appear in.ogg format. When new format achieves some critical mass - and when applications are stable and good enough not just for geeks but for normal people - then they will be embraced and accepted.
WRT your idea about W3C standards; they won't be of any use without applications, and as I said, applications are very difficult to develop. Just look at Mozilla. Just look at codebase of OO. These are BIG apps. Sure, after 4 years of planet-wide debugging now Mozilla works. We need to have a wordprocessor of exceptional quality, or else it won't be accepted. Formats are secondary, and as people suggested, businesses always can have one or two copies of old Word to open old documents; PDF is for the rest of them.
Well, this comment is not very well structured, but it is good enough for posting at 3:25am;-)
It is still my hope that Microsoft is forced to cough up their document formats to a standards body as a result of the anti-trust suits.
I believe, MS does not even have these formats documented. Probably there is some preliminary documentation that is completely obsolete, and nothing more. The real stuff is in the code. They only had to write it once, after all.
Documenting file formats is very difficult because even simpler format, like RTF, is a language on its own, with a syntax, rules, parsers etc. A binary format of Word 97 - which can contain billions of objects in other formats - is a nightmare to implement, and an impossibility to document, especially when MS has no particular reason to do that.
The worst part is not in binary encoded tags, and not in how they are attached to paragraphs of text. The most difficult part in how they affect the document! This, however, is probably beyond the responsibility of the import filter. If a lot if features depend on other modules "as they ended up being designed", then even the complete spec on the file format will be useless. For example, if the tag says "Left indent 0.1" and the rendering module snaps it to 0.25" grid, you have to know about this quirk to recreate the document in a different wordprocessor. Keep in mind that if you don't put every character exactly where Word put it, the paragraph (and the document) may flow (and the layout will be ruined). The fact that metrics of MS fonts may be not available on other systems does not help either...
If most of the documentation is in the code (comments and the code itself) then they can't release it without releasing the sources of the import filter, editor, WYSIWYG renderer... and all the rest of MS Word. IMO, chasing Word is a losing game. A new generation of wordprocessors must be created (OpenOffice is a good one, AbiWord is a decent thing too), and these wordprocessors would be open enough to interoperate well.
Re:Try to catch me ...
on
KaZaA Collapses
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
kazaa users connect to one server to retrieve a list of alternate nodes to connect to
An IP address hardly can be a "circumvention device". More likely, it is speech. The server that the IP points to may even not have anything offending on it. It is more like a general purpose communication network, like a telephone.
Even if those IPs are "evil" now, they could be easily obtained through other means, such as an IRC channel where clients would automatically advertise themselves (or Jabber, or AIM...)
Once you cache 1000 IP addresses, you don't need to go to the main server any more - chances are very good that one of those 1000 boxes is online, and once you connect it will give you the latest and greatest IP list.
Though Freenet itself may be too slow for P2P, real time traffic, it will be perfect as a secure and unbannable distribution medium for IP addresses. The Freenet protocol already has all the necessary types of keys.
"In other words, machines should fast enough to run the game when it's released."
Machines don't eat meat anyway - or what was that food for fasting?;-)
if they'd designed themselves to hook into AOL in a way similar to the AOL keyword search strategy
I believe, AOL's keyword is the AOL's own equivalent of RealNames' product. Why they should share cash with anyone for something they can (and do) provide on their own?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is a possibility. Though, why would they want to have air signals as well as cable? Usually cable carries all local air signals already, and if you are aiming at remote transmitters then you use antenna amplifier, and that isolates the antenna.
Nonsense.
You don't have any signal amplifiers, and what "unshielded cables" you are talking about? Coax cable is shielded.
What one could possibly do is to use a reflectometer to measure where the signal reflects off of irregularities in the line. Unterminated coax connector would reflect everything; a connected TV would absorb everything and reflect nothing. However this is far from being reliable, and is very laborous, and depends on who installed the cable and when and how, and so on... It is much cheaper to just go on with your life and sell more cable packages to someone who pays, rather than chasing ghosts of people who don't want to pay and are skilled enough to get away with that.
On a different note, there is nothing to watch on cable anyway. Why would anyone want one?
But if they don't provide binary distribution to a "common man", for free, then that common man is not going to buy their distribution at work, and is not going to recommend it to anyone. If they are crazy enough to believe that they can sell UL directly to a PHB bypassing PHB's own engineers, they live in a fantasy world. I personally control and dictate use of all open-sourced software in the company; good luck with your UL distro here.
HDD Manufacturers: No, Jucius, we'd rather prefer that your drive fails twice during 7 year period, and you have to buy two replacements instead. This way we will collect not $100 that you offered, but $500 or more, depending on how big the drive is, and we are not liable for anything.
This way they still have the option of "charging people for exceeding ridiculously low monthly bandwidth caps". You can {have,eat} the cake, after all.
I am yet to see one of my tapes degrade ;-) Of course, if you plan to watch some movie 100 times, then probably you'd want to rip it in SVCD or Divx.
it isn't random access
Movies are usually watched from start to finish ;-) It is not that hard to fast-forward +4 hours (there is a counter, you know), it just takes 2 minutes, and then you watch the movie...
eight hours' unattended recording isn't that impressive (even if you manage to find one that doesn't eat eight-hour tapes)
The goal is not to impress. The goal is to serve. What do you mean "eat tapes", BTW? None of modern VCRs (made in last 10 years) will damage the 8 hour tape; it's pretty much the same tape, only more of it.
WRT digital VCR, you already can make one with any frame grabber card and ffmpeg program.
Universe is infinite, probably. There would be no limit. To start with, I wouldn't mind having a local copy of a map of Earth, with resolution to 1cm, in 3D, so that I can "travel" in virtual reality. After that, I'd like to have the same for the sky (astronomy) and nearby planets... Other people could instead prefer a library of all the books, paintings, sculptures, music, photos and movies ever produced, and special publications - as super-detailed images.
There is nothing to read, and there is nothing to discuss anyway (besides the standard grammatical challenges). The horrible "reporting" (if I may call it that) does not deserve reading, linking or even the IP traffic.
Homicidal or comical? Please choose one ;-)
Check out BBC, Pay-Per-View, PBS and other services like this. There *are* business models which do not need commercials. Think outside of the box.
Sure he can. It's his business proposal to TV networks. He watches what he wants, and they don't ad-spam him. Well, if TV moguls don't like his offer, they can take a hike. Business works both ways.
Properly installed Junkbuster removes all advertising from Internet, especially if used with Mozilla. Of course, it all depends on the use of Internet; if you do scientific research you are OK; if you seek entertainment, Junkbuster will break most of those Web sites.
On another note: You say "dodging advertising". I don't "dodge" ads, I hunt them. I am the only person responsible for my browser setup, and I configure it as I wish. If I don't like something in the world, I fix it. Sadly, many people all too readily look for sand to stick their head into.
It is probably called a VCR.
Another advantage of a VHS recorder is that I can buy as many 8-hour tapes as I want, as close as in a nearest drug store. This way I am not limited to 40 hours, 80 hours or whatever. This is important if you are busy now but expect to watch the show at a later time, maybe in few months... and all any of these tapes can be played on any VHS VCR.
The only reason to use Tivo is to use their subscription. But given less and less worthy TV shows with each year, is it that difficult to program the VCR to tape Cartoon Networks from 9:30pm to 1am each Saturday night?
I do, personally. I can use anything, from TeX to Quark Express. That's the "users" who refuse.
You see, I am just tired of getting accused again and again of "sabotaging our company" and "slowing down the document preparation". Valid or not, these are exactly the arguments flying around. What would *you* do if you are daily accused of harming your company and your coworkers? They all say "Word is perfect, SO is a POS." I say "Ok, then use Word but don't complain to me when it fails on you". We shall see how soon they find out that Word is much more primitive than SO.
This technology is beyond Star Trek. Hell, it is even beyond capabilities of most humans (who are most adaptive computers on the planet so far, that we know of.) If I were to sit in a chip, how would I know legal status of the work and of the recording? And what if the legal status changed after the recording was made? And what if the recording is done with permission? And what... -- forget it.
Sure, if the binary Word format can be ever documented.
But you don't need to go that far. All open-source wordprocessors read RTF, and all Word versions cheerfully write RTF. Is it of use? Not really, because wordprocessors themselves fail to make good use of the tagged data. You get the text, but lose layout (I don't even mention embedded objects, graphics, rarely used WordArt etc.)
As I said before, the only wordprocessor which can correctly open MS Word documents is MS Word itself, because every little bug and every little typo in its code affects the layout.
Of course, if I were the dictator (copyright honors go to W), I would just mandate use of HTML and PostScript everywhere. Good or bad - does not matter, it would do the job, and compatibility would be a greater good than loss of minor conveniences here and there.
It might be not possible, in near future. Here is a real life example, less than a week old. I insisted on using StarOffice 5.2 to prepare a user's manual. This is not too fancy document with some simple illustrations, some text and few indexes, total about 20 pages. Result? Total failure. Here is why.
SO 5.2 actually works, in 99% of cases. But it is not good enough. I thought that the user will scream and whine forever about different buttons and different menus. Well, it stopped after a while, and he got used to the new software. This appears to be only a small problem.
The real killer problem is reliability. MS Word had more than 10 years of debugging, it is fairly stable now. SO 5.2 is not. We discovered so many obscure little bugs that by now the decision to migrate StarOffice documents to MS Word is pretty much a done deal. Among those bugs:
The point here is that businesses need reliable, robust, bulletproof wordprocessor. A secretary or a CEO don't want to see obscure dialogs. Can SO and OO get there? Sure. But it will take time, lots of it. MS used its time very wisely, and got a very strong foothold. And anyone who says "Businesses just need bold and italics" are mistaken. Businesses need all features - because technical documents are often very complex and have a maze of page styles. Your suggestion that small formatting loss is OK is not acceptable. Well, you can sell that to me, and I can sell that to you - but neither of us will convince our coworkers that they should come to work on weekends and fix conversion bugs.
So you said dependence on tools like Word will keep businesses enslaved by Microsoft. True, but most businesses don't understand that, and they don't care either. They won't migrate to anything just because it is marginally cheaper.
IMO, the way of liberating our documents is in gradual migration from Office formats to open formats and open applications. Look how Ogg Vorbis slowly but surely enters the MP3 world. Still 99% of all songs are in MP3, but more and more appear in .ogg format. When new format achieves some critical mass - and when applications are stable and good enough not just for geeks but for normal people - then they will be embraced and accepted.
WRT your idea about W3C standards; they won't be of any use without applications, and as I said, applications are very difficult to develop. Just look at Mozilla. Just look at codebase of OO. These are BIG apps. Sure, after 4 years of planet-wide debugging now Mozilla works. We need to have a wordprocessor of exceptional quality, or else it won't be accepted. Formats are secondary, and as people suggested, businesses always can have one or two copies of old Word to open old documents; PDF is for the rest of them.
Well, this comment is not very well structured, but it is good enough for posting at 3:25am ;-)
I believe, MS does not even have these formats documented. Probably there is some preliminary documentation that is completely obsolete, and nothing more. The real stuff is in the code. They only had to write it once, after all.
Documenting file formats is very difficult because even simpler format, like RTF, is a language on its own, with a syntax, rules, parsers etc. A binary format of Word 97 - which can contain billions of objects in other formats - is a nightmare to implement, and an impossibility to document, especially when MS has no particular reason to do that.
The worst part is not in binary encoded tags, and not in how they are attached to paragraphs of text. The most difficult part in how they affect the document! This, however, is probably beyond the responsibility of the import filter. If a lot if features depend on other modules "as they ended up being designed", then even the complete spec on the file format will be useless. For example, if the tag says "Left indent 0.1" and the rendering module snaps it to 0.25" grid, you have to know about this quirk to recreate the document in a different wordprocessor. Keep in mind that if you don't put every character exactly where Word put it, the paragraph (and the document) may flow (and the layout will be ruined). The fact that metrics of MS fonts may be not available on other systems does not help either...
If most of the documentation is in the code (comments and the code itself) then they can't release it without releasing the sources of the import filter, editor, WYSIWYG renderer... and all the rest of MS Word. IMO, chasing Word is a losing game. A new generation of wordprocessors must be created (OpenOffice is a good one, AbiWord is a decent thing too), and these wordprocessors would be open enough to interoperate well.
Now it does. I have it, use it and it is OK. Here is what they say on the Web site:
See Web page.
LimeWire, for example. It is not bad.
"In other words, machines should fast enough to run the game when it's released." Machines don't eat meat anyway - or what was that food for fasting? ;-)
"http://resolver.realnames.com/who.pl? "
(the UNICODE will be in UTF-8 in HTTP). Of course, a Java applet or a HTML form for the same action would be a trivial 3-minute exercise for anyone.
I believe, AOL's keyword is the AOL's own equivalent of RealNames' product. Why they should share cash with anyone for something they can (and do) provide on their own?