Don't take electronics like a laptop into the Namibian desert. The sand there is some of the finest in the world since it is so old. So far I've lost two film cameras and one digital one to Namibian dust. Some people are having better luck keeping their equipment in a sealed, dust proof case and only removing it at night in a calm setting. The dust there is so fine it is almost invisible. It gets into everything. Have some fun, go up to the Kunene River and sneak into Angola for a day. Or stalk the desert rhino on foot if you can find one.
The people I talked to said FIOS is going to change the modulation scheme for IP TV when it is ready. You are correct it is currently RF modulated but I don't believe their long term plans are to leave it that way.
Verizon doesn't shut you off for bandwidth consumption. Most I've ever pulled down is 400GB in a week. I left an Unbuntu torrent up and hammered the 5Mb up solid for a week too. No one said anything. I have talked to high level people in the FIOS group. Current policy is that you get the bandwidth you paid for. I don't believe FIOS is a shared medium like CATV coax. The FIOS network is being designed to handle IPTV, it has enormous unused capacity.
Someone who knows how bandwidth pricing works may know more about this. But Verizon is a Tier 1 provider. That means that all of the Tier 2/3 ISPs end up paying them for bandwidth. It may be that my net usage makes them money by extracting Tier 2/3 payments given that Verizon has plenty of spare net capacity (which them seem to have). Multiply this times several million FIOS users. Comcast is a Tier 2 and has to pay for their interchange traffic.
The 20/20 symmetrical offering is a business class service with bandwidth and uptime guarantees.
I declare something legacy when it doesn't make sense to deploy it anymore. No one would do another coax plant build out in today's market, they would all build out with fiber.
I'm anxiously awaiting the 100 uncompressed HD channels were supposed to be getting on FOIS this spring. They are the same 100 channels that DirectTV is already transmitting.
I love Comcast's announcement at CES of a 1000 HD channels and HD on-demand offerings. What kind of marketing double speak is that? Let's count the apples and oranges together so we can hide the fact that we don't have any oranges.
FIOS OTN is my basement is running at 680Mb/s. I'm paying $40 to get 20Mb/s of that. They have 2.4Gb/s OTNs but there's no need to deploy them yet. Coax cable plants are legacy.
It may be as simple as the fact that Verizon is a tier one Internet provider (with no settlement fees) and Comcast is not. All of the Bit Torrent traffic is causing Comcast to pay Verizon settlement fees. Talking to some Verizon employees I get the idea that they can deploy FIOS for another ten years without impacting the backbone bandwidth they have available.
I have 20/5 service and I'm doing about 100GB a week in traffic.
My top complaint is that they block port 80 which is perfectly legal web server traffic and let you do anything you want peer to peer. I've pointed this out to several employees who are passing it up the chain as a potential PR problem. All the employees admit the P2P traffic is 50x anything that home web servers would generate. The excuse (which may be true) is that this is old policy from the days when http worms were everywhere and home users couldn't deal with them.
You are way over estimating the IRS take. Most people don't pay anything on the first $15,000. The 15% applies only to the last dollar earned, not all of the dollars earned.
I get free printers and throw them away when the initial ink runs out. I've gone through about ten printers so far. Way cheaper than buying the cartridges.
Sub-pixel rendering only works on LCDs. There is no way to maintain registration between the scanning beam and the shadow mask on CRTs so it can't be used there. Full pixel based anti-aliasing does work on CRTs.
I use sub-pixel rendering under Linux. My screen is about 90 DPI. I need a magnifying glass to see it working or I have to be six inches from the screen. Maybe the Linux version isn't as obnoxious. I took the wikipedia pictures with a 60x microscope.
If the color fringing is obvious you may have a BRG screen instead of a RGB screen. There is a control panel setting to change this. You may even have a screen with vertical RGB/BGR stripes instead of horizontal.
Click on the microscope photos at the bottom of the Wikipedia article. They'll show you what is going on.
I'll second the N800. Light, 7oz and does almost everything a laptop does. Plays music and movies, runs Linux in case there is a sudden urge for hacking, Opera browser, bluetooth, wifi, photo offload, fit in a big pocket, has a GPS option. Good deal for $400.
Comcast did a software upgrade of their HD DVR and my Philips HDTV quit working with a blue screen declaring HDCP handshake error. After three days of service calls and getting a regional tech to come to my house, Comcast gave up and produced a box without HDCP enabled and gave it to me. I guess their are limits to how much even a vendor like Comcast will put up with copy protection hassles.
Capital gains are taxed twice. The corporation pays corporate tax on it profits. The profits that are left after the corporate taxes cause the capital gains which are then taxed again. The sum of these those taxes exceeds the ordinary income tax rate. In reality Paris is paying a lot more in taxes than you are.
If you want to treat capital gains like ordinary income you would need to eliminate the corporate income tax. But doing that is politically unpopular even though the taxes collected would be about the same.
Everybody thinks of corporations as separate entities, they are not. The are owned by their shareholders which are people. Ultimately everything is owned by a person. Taxing a legal entity like a corporation is just a different way of taxing the person that owns the shares.
Lowering the capital gains tax lowers the cost of capital to corporations which gives them more money to expand. Expanding corporations generate a lot of jobs. This was massively demonstrated by the Reagan tax cuts in the early 80's.
The baby boomer generation of management controls Hollywood. They pick what gets made and who does it. This generation is more concerned about milking exisiting ideas to line their pockets for retirement than taking risks and doing something original. They've run out of new ideas and always want to play it safe. Things aren't going to get better until they are gone. When the next generation starts to get control innovation will begin anew.
I've always wondered if something like this could be used to build a flat panel TV. You would send the waves into a panel and then use some kind of strobe illumination to view the scenes.
I agree, my Comcast link is providing exactly the bandwidth advertised. Of course Verizon is wiring the neighborhood for FIOS so now would be a bad time for Comcast to screw up.
Sometimes poor bandwidth is caused by noise on the line. When I lived way out in the suburbs that was a problem but Comcast finally cleaned it up after about three months of trying to find it. Problem turned out to be an illegal, overpowered CB transmitter that had enough power that it interfered with the cable on the utility pole located near the antenna.
"...Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device.
Doesn't this say that the RIAA admits that you are buying a legitimate copy, then they say that you won't be stupid enough to pay again for the same song? This is going to get as bad as Windows, even though I own at least 15 copies the one on my machine probably wouldn't past muster with the license police. I love this strategy of creating enough legal licensing hassle that you are effectively forced to repurchase the same item multiple times just to be sure that it is legal.
Intel graphics are integrated into the North or South bridge chips (I don't remember which one). That means they can only be put onto a motherboard and not on a standalone card. Intel did discrete graphics chips a long time ago (i720?) and it failed.
Everyone ignores Intel 3D because their graphics solution uses UMA (unified memory architecture). UMA is much slower than discrete graphics cards with private VRAM. So Intel solutions suck at running high end games.
Intel has the ability to compete in standalone high end graphics, they are just chosing not to.
Intel recently hired Keith Packard so their drivers should improve in the near future.
1) open source the drivers. Not going to happen. The drivers contain third party code and they don't want to open source since it will ruin their ability to sell code. Nvidia views their driver code as a competitive advantage.
2) spec for the hardware. Not going to happen. Patent fears. Bugs in the hardware. If you knew which chips had bad hardware bugs you wouldn't buy the boards. So they hide the errata and build work around kludges in the drivers.
It all boils down to control. Nvidia/ATI are stopping Xegl simply by refusing to provide drivers for it. There is nothing we can do from the outside except build a perversion like XGL(Xglx).
ATI is clearly in second place on Linux and moving towards third (Intel). If they had some backbone they would release hardware specs for all of their cards. Even better, get the ok to release driver source.
Xegl is derived from OpenGL/ES. PS/3 is using OpenGL/ES. If Linux and the PS/3 had the same video API it would be easier to port games from consoles to Linux. Expanding the Linux game market will drive video card sales. ATI has a chance to own the lead if they would support Xegl.
Instead we live of the crumbs of a company like HP wanting to sell Hollywood Linux systems and paying Nvidia to write the drivers they need.
Linux is not in control of it's video destiny and there is little we can do about.
The next posts will say Open Graphics, but that's a real long shot.
The price of these acquisitions is chump change for Oracle. My bet is that they are buying these companies to destroy them. Oracle does not want something like Mysql becoming a real threat to their DB business, so the tried and true solution is to kill the babies before they grow up. They will attempt to migrate what customers they can and then stop development on the acquired code bases. The acquired developers, if they stick around, will be put to work building migration tools.
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Don't take electronics like a laptop into the Namibian desert. The sand there is some of the finest in the world since it is so old. So far I've lost two film cameras and one digital one to Namibian dust. Some people are having better luck keeping their equipment in a sealed, dust proof case and only removing it at night in a calm setting. The dust there is so fine it is almost invisible. It gets into everything. Have some fun, go up to the Kunene River and sneak into Angola for a day. Or stalk the desert rhino on foot if you can find one.
Researchers I know would fill up a yottabyte if they were allowed to. I hope Google has plans for keeping growth of the datasets under control.
The people I talked to said FIOS is going to change the modulation scheme for IP TV when it is ready. You are correct it is currently RF modulated but I don't believe their long term plans are to leave it that way.
Verizon doesn't shut you off for bandwidth consumption. Most I've ever pulled down is 400GB in a week. I left an Unbuntu torrent up and hammered the 5Mb up solid for a week too. No one said anything. I have talked to high level people in the FIOS group. Current policy is that you get the bandwidth you paid for. I don't believe FIOS is a shared medium like CATV coax. The FIOS network is being designed to handle IPTV, it has enormous unused capacity.
Someone who knows how bandwidth pricing works may know more about this. But Verizon is a Tier 1 provider. That means that all of the Tier 2/3 ISPs end up paying them for bandwidth. It may be that my net usage makes them money by extracting Tier 2/3 payments given that Verizon has plenty of spare net capacity (which them seem to have). Multiply this times several million FIOS users. Comcast is a Tier 2 and has to pay for their interchange traffic.
The 20/20 symmetrical offering is a business class service with bandwidth and uptime guarantees.
I declare something legacy when it doesn't make sense to deploy it anymore. No one would do another coax plant build out in today's market, they would all build out with fiber.
I'm anxiously awaiting the 100 uncompressed HD channels were supposed to be getting on FOIS this spring. They are the same 100 channels that DirectTV is already transmitting.
I love Comcast's announcement at CES of a 1000 HD channels and HD on-demand offerings. What kind of marketing double speak is that? Let's count the apples and oranges together so we can hide the fact that we don't have any oranges.
No, I get 5Mb/s up. I can check it with Speakeasy and it is really there. For $200/mth you can get 40/40Mb symmetrical service.
FIOS OTN is my basement is running at 680Mb/s. I'm paying $40 to get 20Mb/s of that. They have 2.4Gb/s OTNs but there's no need to deploy them yet. Coax cable plants are legacy.
Anyone know what this number is? It has called my cell phone over 100 times and there is never anyone there when I bother to answer it.
It may be as simple as the fact that Verizon is a tier one Internet provider (with no settlement fees) and Comcast is not. All of the Bit Torrent traffic is causing Comcast to pay Verizon settlement fees. Talking to some Verizon employees I get the idea that they can deploy FIOS for another ten years without impacting the backbone bandwidth they have available.
I have 20/5 service and I'm doing about 100GB a week in traffic.
My top complaint is that they block port 80 which is perfectly legal web server traffic and let you do anything you want peer to peer. I've pointed this out to several employees who are passing it up the chain as a potential PR problem. All the employees admit the P2P traffic is 50x anything that home web servers would generate. The excuse (which may be true) is that this is old policy from the days when http worms were everywhere and home users couldn't deal with them.
You are way over estimating the IRS take. Most people don't pay anything on the first $15,000. The 15% applies only to the last dollar earned, not all of the dollars earned.
Come to Wellesley, MA. I just read the town's budget and the average teacher is getting $78,000/year here.
I get free printers and throw them away when the initial ink runs out. I've gone through about ten printers so far. Way cheaper than buying the cartridges.
Sub-pixel rendering only works on LCDs. There is no way to maintain registration between the scanning beam and the shadow mask on CRTs so it can't be used there. Full pixel based anti-aliasing does work on CRTs.
I use sub-pixel rendering under Linux. My screen is about 90 DPI. I need a magnifying glass to see it working or I have to be six inches from the screen. Maybe the Linux version isn't as obnoxious. I took the wikipedia pictures with a 60x microscope.
If the color fringing is obvious you may have a BRG screen instead of a RGB screen. There is a control panel setting to change this. You may even have a screen with vertical RGB/BGR stripes instead of horizontal.
Click on the microscope photos at the bottom of the Wikipedia article. They'll show you what is going on.
I'll second the N800. Light, 7oz and does almost everything a laptop does. Plays music and movies, runs Linux in case there is a sudden urge for hacking, Opera browser, bluetooth, wifi, photo offload, fit in a big pocket, has a GPS option. Good deal for $400.
Comcast did a software upgrade of their HD DVR and my Philips HDTV quit working with a blue screen declaring HDCP handshake error. After three days of service calls and getting a regional tech to come to my house, Comcast gave up and produced a box without HDCP enabled and gave it to me. I guess their are limits to how much even a vendor like Comcast will put up with copy protection hassles.
Capital gains are taxed twice. The corporation pays corporate tax on it profits. The profits that are left after the corporate taxes cause the capital gains which are then taxed again. The sum of these those taxes exceeds the ordinary income tax rate. In reality Paris is paying a lot more in taxes than you are.
If you want to treat capital gains like ordinary income you would need to eliminate the corporate income tax. But doing that is politically unpopular even though the taxes collected would be about the same.
Everybody thinks of corporations as separate entities, they are not. The are owned by their shareholders which are people. Ultimately everything is owned by a person. Taxing a legal entity like a corporation is just a different way of taxing the person that owns the shares.
Lowering the capital gains tax lowers the cost of capital to corporations which gives them more money to expand. Expanding corporations generate a lot of jobs. This was massively demonstrated by the Reagan tax cuts in the early 80's.
The baby boomer generation of management controls Hollywood. They pick what gets made and who does it. This generation is more concerned about milking exisiting ideas to line their pockets for retirement than taking risks and doing something original. They've run out of new ideas and always want to play it safe. Things aren't going to get better until they are gone. When the next generation starts to get control innovation will begin anew.
I've always wondered if something like this could be used to build a flat panel TV. You would send the waves into a panel and then use some kind of strobe illumination to view the scenes.
I agree, my Comcast link is providing exactly the bandwidth advertised. Of course Verizon is wiring the neighborhood for FIOS so now would be a bad time for Comcast to screw up.
Sometimes poor bandwidth is caused by noise on the line. When I lived way out in the suburbs that was a problem but Comcast finally cleaned it up after about three months of trying to find it. Problem turned out to be an illegal, overpowered CB transmitter that had enough power that it interfered with the cable on the utility pole located near the antenna.
"...Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device.
Doesn't this say that the RIAA admits that you are buying a legitimate copy, then they say that you won't be stupid enough to pay again for the same song? This is going to get as bad as Windows, even though I own at least 15 copies the one on my machine probably wouldn't past muster with the license police. I love this strategy of creating enough legal licensing hassle that you are effectively forced to repurchase the same item multiple times just to be sure that it is legal.
Intel graphics are integrated into the North or South bridge chips (I don't remember which one). That means they can only be put onto a motherboard and not on a standalone card. Intel did discrete graphics chips a long time ago (i720?) and it failed.
Everyone ignores Intel 3D because their graphics solution uses UMA (unified memory architecture). UMA is much slower than discrete graphics cards with private VRAM. So Intel solutions suck at running high end games.
Intel has the ability to compete in standalone high end graphics, they are just chosing not to.
Intel recently hired Keith Packard so their drivers should improve in the near future.
There are two issues:
1) open source the drivers. Not going to happen. The drivers contain third party code and they don't want to open source since it will ruin their ability to sell code. Nvidia views their driver code as a competitive advantage.
2) spec for the hardware. Not going to happen. Patent fears. Bugs in the hardware. If you knew which chips had bad hardware bugs you wouldn't buy the boards. So they hide the errata and build work around kludges in the drivers.
It all boils down to control. Nvidia/ATI are stopping Xegl simply by refusing to provide drivers for it. There is nothing we can do from the outside except build a perversion like XGL(Xglx).
ATI is clearly in second place on Linux and moving towards third (Intel). If they had some backbone they would release hardware specs for all of their cards. Even better, get the ok to release driver source.
Xegl is derived from OpenGL/ES. PS/3 is using OpenGL/ES. If Linux and the PS/3 had the same video API it would be easier to port games from consoles to Linux. Expanding the Linux game market will drive video card sales. ATI has a chance to own the lead if they would support Xegl.
Instead we live of the crumbs of a company like HP wanting to sell Hollywood Linux systems and paying Nvidia to write the drivers they need.
Linux is not in control of it's video destiny and there is little we can do about.
The next posts will say Open Graphics, but that's a real long shot.
The price of these acquisitions is chump change for Oracle. My bet is that they are buying these companies to destroy them. Oracle does not want something like Mysql becoming a real threat to their DB business, so the tried and true solution is to kill the babies before they grow up. They will attempt to migrate what customers they can and then stop development on the acquired code bases. The acquired developers, if they stick around, will be put to work building migration tools.
They would charge about $10 month if I'm reading the charts right.