One thing you missed with all this is the encryption/decryption mechanism that both STBs provide. The content providers require, by contract, that the signal be encrypted end-to-end. STBs are pre-loaded with a decryption method (ones from Motorola claim that their encryption mechanism has never been broken). The CableCARD units were essentially just decryption units.
Almost every TV sold in the US has the ability to watch digital television (even over cable systems), as long as it is not encrypted. Systems that don't encrypt don't require a STB (this is how I've deployed my CATV system).
Digital Cable (QAM) is essentially Multicast video. It is either MPEG2-TS or MPEG4-TS, multi-program streams, just like IPTV. The only thing that makes it different is that it gets packed into 38MB/s streams for each "channel" (OTA digital TV does the same thing -- packs MPEG-2 streams into 19MB/s streams).
There are lots of companies that have been producing cheaper STBs for years -- but again, they won't always be compatible with the Cable Co's chosen encryption method. Blonder Tounge makes an HD/DVR tuner for about $140, without encryption. K-World makes a HD Tuner for about $80. New Motorola STBs start at about $180 for a HD unit, and $360 for a HD/DVR unit). These prices are without volume.
The big reason why CableCARDS failed was that the cable companies made them so hard to use. Even in their 'hayday', Comcast and TimeWarner didn't list them on their website, and if you called in for one, you had to know how to navigate their systems better than they did. Comcast, in most regions, blocked the EPG data from any non-motorola receiver (they did this by using some non-RFC additions to the EPG data to make it so it would be thrown out by compatible systems). When the TV manufactures realized that they weren't getting anywhere with the Cable CO's on the CableCARD front, they stopped putting the slots into their sets to save money.
The president is proposing that students be able to take at least take a single course in CS. They aren't mandating that it becomes everybody's major. I think a bit of exposure to CS will do the world a huge favor. Maybe my kids will grow up in a world where the laptop is not known as the "hard drive", and a monitor is not known as a "computer". Maybe if people understand the basic underpinnings of the Internet, privacy won't written off as something nerds care about. Maybe, just maybe, if people are comfortable with even using the computer, we will actually experience that thing people keep referring to as "the year of Linux!" Heck, maybe this initiative will turn out some people who understand that coping a file takes 10 seconds, but building a new application takes longer.
All the kids of the US won't become C++ programmers in one class, but at least they will get some exposure into what programming even means. With any luck, this will inspire some kids who didn't have any exposure into the subject to learn more, and become programmers, or computer scientists, or computer engineers.
Except, the state took over the city because they passed a law saying their finances weren't in order. The governor (Snyder) appointed a "EFM" to manage the city. One of his decisions was to no longer purchase water from the metro Detroit system (rumor has it, that they wanted to punish Detroit and make it less financially solvent by removing one of the larger water purchasers), and use the very old connections to the Flint River. The EPA sent up red flags immediately, but it got tied up in court until a few months ago. In the mean time, FEMA, the Salvation Army and many others have been delivering bottled water to schools and other community centers so people wouldn't be poisoned by the water they were buying (and being provided by in the schools, etc).
The amount they saved switching to the Flint River was less than 1%.... but with this entire debacle, the city will owe so much more money because the acidic river (which, by the way was found to be heavily polluted due to run-off from neighboring cities), managed to eat many of their already crumbling infrastructure.
Except the elected officials were taken out of power, by a law passed (repealed by vote of the people, then passed again in the middle of the night), and were replaced by an appointed official, responsible only to the Governor. The elected officials they had were unable to stop the switch, even though the EPA raised flags before the move happened. Everybody was ignored, but you know -- they think they were going to save a few bucks!
Except, the state, and it's republican government took over the city because they passed a law saying their finances weren't in order. The governor (Snyder) appointed a "EFM" to manage the city. One of his decisions was to no longer purchase water from the metro Detroit system (rumor has it, that they wanted to punish Detroit and make it less financially solvent by removing one of the larger water purchasers), and use the very old connections to the Flint River. The EPA sent up red flags immediately, but it got tied up in court until a few months ago. In the mean time, FEMA, the Salvation Army and many others have been delivering bottled water to schools and other community centers so people wouldn't be poisoned by the water they were buying (and being provided by in the schools, etc).
The amount they saved switching to the Flint River was less than 1%.... but with this entire debacle, the city will owe so much more money because the acidic river (which, by the way was found to be heavily polluted due to run-off from neighboring cities), managed to eat many of their already crumbling infrastructure.
But go ahead, play politics you don't know about and blame the democrats on this one. Hope it makes you feel better.
What ends up happening is that if 3/4 the tickets are taken up by bots, and they only sell 1/2 their tickets you still have a venue that looks empty. Concessions are down, and the talent complains because the seats aren't filled.
And what alternatives are there? Don't say Linux -- because if you look at the overall ecosystem, things don't "just work", and every updates breaks just about everything else...
It's not that they have your back -- it's that they use their own certificate chain of trust that doesn't rely on the OS. It's baked into the source code, and can't be updated unless you upgrade versions (also, if one gets blacklisted, you don't notice it either).
If you decide not to vote (by enabling telemetry data collection), then don't complain when they take the features away because they can't tell people are using it. The reason why they collect the data is so they can make informed decisions like this -- rather than just guessing.
The thing is, I don't want to count on everyone having the latest version. I want to be able to test my site or app, and to know that if it works in testing and I push out to production, my users will enjoy the same fully working system I signed off. And they will still be able to enjoy the same fully working system tomorrow, and next week, and next month.
Then maybe you shouldn't be relying on clients that are not under your control. You may want to push out thick clients or apps that you control the versioning of so that you can dictate the version numbers of everything.
The thing with browsers is that you write to a loose standard. Everybody interperates that standard a bit differently, but mostly the same. Your goal is to make your site as compatible with the standards as possible so that it can be viewed by as many people as possible, and by a wide array of browsers. Most apps written for the browser stretch this limit to the point where they rely on quirks in the browsers, which break between version updates....
RAW files are a dump of the camera sensor. They generally require processing to produce something useful (although both Canon and Nikon RAW files now include a JPEG embedded into the file format for preview). The reason why you would want a dump of the camera sensor is so that you can do post-production work like adjusting the white balance, adjust the exposure, etc. JPEGs already have this data "baked" and product much poorer results when trying to do this post-production work.
One of the side-affects of this will be that we will see more and more TV stations fail. Pharama chew up a lot of ad time, and consequently help pay for a tonne of the OTA TV that we all watch. If all that disappeared, I see a huge hole in the budget for a lot of broadcasters...
UNIX was a property of AT&T (Bell Labs), and sold to Novell in the mid-nineties. Since Novell bought it, there hasn't been an operating that was truly UNIX. The last boxed copy of UNIX was in the early 90's... There have been many OSes that have licensed Unix and many more that were derivatives of it. BSD (which was based off UNIX System V) was one variant, and Linux was based off that.
Professional Engineers are licensed through the state. Professional Engineers are Civils, Mechanicals, Electrical engineers that hold a certification through the state licensing board.
Doctors are also certified by the state. Lawyers are certified by a board of their peers, but still require a license to practice law in the state.
I actually like how a majority of the polling stations are setup in Michigan.
User gets a paper ballot. They either need to fill in the bubble or complete a line to vote for somebody. When they are finished, they feed the paper ballot through an electronic reader that places them in a locked box.
When the election is closed they count the paper ballots in the open. If the number they count matches the electronic number then the vote is certified and the precinct is reported. If it doesn't, then they have to recount. If there is still a discrepancy then the county clerk gets involved.
During this last election this week, the results took about 30 minutes to post after the polls closed. One of the larger elections in recent history (November 2008) they took about two hours to post.
But where is "Free or Open Source" software on the magic quadrant? For some odd reason C-level people love those charts and believe everything Forrester feeds them.
And that's assuming they get it right. The last two times (and these will be the last two times) I tried to do the online order, pick up from the store at Best Buy, I waited > 30 minutes in line to pick up the order, only to be told that they didn't have the item in stock (then why did you email me saying it was ready!), or if they pick it, they pull the open-box model and try and pass it off as new. In both cases they had new, unopened items on the shelf, and both required them to cancel my order and do a regular purchase. Luckily, only one of the two times they charged my card twice.
In the business community, it's pretty common to still see rates of about $0.10/minute for long distance and $0.10/call for local calls. It's not a great rate, but it's not out of the ordinary. Business lines are still far from the unlimited/unlimited rates offered to consumers.
The data they are accused of using is the popularity of the various players on their own site. They can reasonably predict that similar "claim" percentages are on the completing site.
The sites don't list that, for example, 75% of the people on the site have Tom Brady on their teams. The insiders would know this, and would adjust their own picks based on that knowledge.
Both high schools I attended started between 7:15am and 7:30am. One was located in Northern Illinois, and the other was located in Western Michigan. I graduated in 1999, and I don't think either has changed much. Middle school had classes starting at 7:05am and elementary school was at 7:45.
IPv6 still has very experimental support for things like PIM (or the equivalent), which is very important if you want to limit which groups get multicast. There are two current methods to have multicast traffic be controlled -- and both are not compatible with each other -- and both cause multicast traffic to hit the CPU of switches and routers in every brand I've found. This is really problematic when you are trying to transfer large amounts of multicast traffic (like video, for example), because every packet will have to be inspected by the CPU or flooded out to each port. In my case I'm constantly streaming ~ 8GB/s of multicast video....
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One thing you missed with all this is the encryption/decryption mechanism that both STBs provide. The content providers require, by contract, that the signal be encrypted end-to-end. STBs are pre-loaded with a decryption method (ones from Motorola claim that their encryption mechanism has never been broken). The CableCARD units were essentially just decryption units.
Almost every TV sold in the US has the ability to watch digital television (even over cable systems), as long as it is not encrypted. Systems that don't encrypt don't require a STB (this is how I've deployed my CATV system).
Digital Cable (QAM) is essentially Multicast video. It is either MPEG2-TS or MPEG4-TS, multi-program streams, just like IPTV. The only thing that makes it different is that it gets packed into 38MB/s streams for each "channel" (OTA digital TV does the same thing -- packs MPEG-2 streams into 19MB/s streams).
There are lots of companies that have been producing cheaper STBs for years -- but again, they won't always be compatible with the Cable Co's chosen encryption method. Blonder Tounge makes an HD/DVR tuner for about $140, without encryption. K-World makes a HD Tuner for about $80. New Motorola STBs start at about $180 for a HD unit, and $360 for a HD/DVR unit). These prices are without volume.
The big reason why CableCARDS failed was that the cable companies made them so hard to use. Even in their 'hayday', Comcast and TimeWarner didn't list them on their website, and if you called in for one, you had to know how to navigate their systems better than they did. Comcast, in most regions, blocked the EPG data from any non-motorola receiver (they did this by using some non-RFC additions to the EPG data to make it so it would be thrown out by compatible systems). When the TV manufactures realized that they weren't getting anywhere with the Cable CO's on the CableCARD front, they stopped putting the slots into their sets to save money.
The president is proposing that students be able to take at least take a single course in CS. They aren't mandating that it becomes everybody's major. I think a bit of exposure to CS will do the world a huge favor. Maybe my kids will grow up in a world where the laptop is not known as the "hard drive", and a monitor is not known as a "computer". Maybe if people understand the basic underpinnings of the Internet, privacy won't written off as something nerds care about. Maybe, just maybe, if people are comfortable with even using the computer, we will actually experience that thing people keep referring to as "the year of Linux!" Heck, maybe this initiative will turn out some people who understand that coping a file takes 10 seconds, but building a new application takes longer.
All the kids of the US won't become C++ programmers in one class, but at least they will get some exposure into what programming even means. With any luck, this will inspire some kids who didn't have any exposure into the subject to learn more, and become programmers, or computer scientists, or computer engineers.
5.x had the WAV file output included in the base package as well. I've been using 5.63 on a daily basis for years and it's had that feature...
Except, the state took over the city because they passed a law saying their finances weren't in order. The governor (Snyder) appointed a "EFM" to manage the city. One of his decisions was to no longer purchase water from the metro Detroit system (rumor has it, that they wanted to punish Detroit and make it less financially solvent by removing one of the larger water purchasers), and use the very old connections to the Flint River. The EPA sent up red flags immediately, but it got tied up in court until a few months ago. In the mean time, FEMA, the Salvation Army and many others have been delivering bottled water to schools and other community centers so people wouldn't be poisoned by the water they were buying (and being provided by in the schools, etc).
The amount they saved switching to the Flint River was less than 1%.... but with this entire debacle, the city will owe so much more money because the acidic river (which, by the way was found to be heavily polluted due to run-off from neighboring cities), managed to eat many of their already crumbling infrastructure.
Except the elected officials were taken out of power, by a law passed (repealed by vote of the people, then passed again in the middle of the night), and were replaced by an appointed official, responsible only to the Governor. The elected officials they had were unable to stop the switch, even though the EPA raised flags before the move happened. Everybody was ignored, but you know -- they think they were going to save a few bucks!
Except, the state, and it's republican government took over the city because they passed a law saying their finances weren't in order. The governor (Snyder) appointed a "EFM" to manage the city. One of his decisions was to no longer purchase water from the metro Detroit system (rumor has it, that they wanted to punish Detroit and make it less financially solvent by removing one of the larger water purchasers), and use the very old connections to the Flint River. The EPA sent up red flags immediately, but it got tied up in court until a few months ago. In the mean time, FEMA, the Salvation Army and many others have been delivering bottled water to schools and other community centers so people wouldn't be poisoned by the water they were buying (and being provided by in the schools, etc).
The amount they saved switching to the Flint River was less than 1%.... but with this entire debacle, the city will owe so much more money because the acidic river (which, by the way was found to be heavily polluted due to run-off from neighboring cities), managed to eat many of their already crumbling infrastructure.
But go ahead, play politics you don't know about and blame the democrats on this one. Hope it makes you feel better.
What ends up happening is that if 3/4 the tickets are taken up by bots, and they only sell 1/2 their tickets you still have a venue that looks empty. Concessions are down, and the talent complains because the seats aren't filled.
And what alternatives are there? Don't say Linux -- because if you look at the overall ecosystem, things don't "just work", and every updates breaks just about everything else...
It's not that they have your back -- it's that they use their own certificate chain of trust that doesn't rely on the OS. It's baked into the source code, and can't be updated unless you upgrade versions (also, if one gets blacklisted, you don't notice it either).
If you decide not to vote (by enabling telemetry data collection), then don't complain when they take the features away because they can't tell people are using it. The reason why they collect the data is so they can make informed decisions like this -- rather than just guessing.
The thing is, I don't want to count on everyone having the latest version. I want to be able to test my site or app, and to know that if it works in testing and I push out to production, my users will enjoy the same fully working system I signed off. And they will still be able to enjoy the same fully working system tomorrow, and next week, and next month.
Then maybe you shouldn't be relying on clients that are not under your control. You may want to push out thick clients or apps that you control the versioning of so that you can dictate the version numbers of everything.
The thing with browsers is that you write to a loose standard. Everybody interperates that standard a bit differently, but mostly the same. Your goal is to make your site as compatible with the standards as possible so that it can be viewed by as many people as possible, and by a wide array of browsers. Most apps written for the browser stretch this limit to the point where they rely on quirks in the browsers, which break between version updates....
RAW files are a dump of the camera sensor. They generally require processing to produce something useful (although both Canon and Nikon RAW files now include a JPEG embedded into the file format for preview). The reason why you would want a dump of the camera sensor is so that you can do post-production work like adjusting the white balance, adjust the exposure, etc. JPEGs already have this data "baked" and product much poorer results when trying to do this post-production work.
One of the side-affects of this will be that we will see more and more TV stations fail. Pharama chew up a lot of ad time, and consequently help pay for a tonne of the OTA TV that we all watch. If all that disappeared, I see a huge hole in the budget for a lot of broadcasters...
UNIX was a property of AT&T (Bell Labs), and sold to Novell in the mid-nineties. Since Novell bought it, there hasn't been an operating that was truly UNIX. The last boxed copy of UNIX was in the early 90's... There have been many OSes that have licensed Unix and many more that were derivatives of it. BSD (which was based off UNIX System V) was one variant, and Linux was based off that.
Um.
Professional Engineers are licensed through the state. Professional Engineers are Civils, Mechanicals, Electrical engineers that hold a certification through the state licensing board.
Doctors are also certified by the state. Lawyers are certified by a board of their peers, but still require a license to practice law in the state.
Well, I guess they could make it more illegal than it already is.....
The people doing it now don't care about the rules. If they get caught, they will just run away, shut down that AWS instance and boot up another one.
I actually like how a majority of the polling stations are setup in Michigan.
User gets a paper ballot. They either need to fill in the bubble or complete a line to vote for somebody. When they are finished, they feed the paper ballot through an electronic reader that places them in a locked box.
When the election is closed they count the paper ballots in the open. If the number they count matches the electronic number then the vote is certified and the precinct is reported. If it doesn't, then they have to recount. If there is still a discrepancy then the county clerk gets involved.
During this last election this week, the results took about 30 minutes to post after the polls closed. One of the larger elections in recent history (November 2008) they took about two hours to post.
But where is "Free or Open Source" software on the magic quadrant? For some odd reason C-level people love those charts and believe everything Forrester feeds them.
And that's assuming they get it right. The last two times (and these will be the last two times) I tried to do the online order, pick up from the store at Best Buy, I waited > 30 minutes in line to pick up the order, only to be told that they didn't have the item in stock (then why did you email me saying it was ready!), or if they pick it, they pull the open-box model and try and pass it off as new. In both cases they had new, unopened items on the shelf, and both required them to cancel my order and do a regular purchase. Luckily, only one of the two times they charged my card twice.
In the business community, it's pretty common to still see rates of about $0.10/minute for long distance and $0.10/call for local calls. It's not a great rate, but it's not out of the ordinary. Business lines are still far from the unlimited/unlimited rates offered to consumers.
The data they are accused of using is the popularity of the various players on their own site. They can reasonably predict that similar "claim" percentages are on the completing site.
The sites don't list that, for example, 75% of the people on the site have Tom Brady on their teams. The insiders would know this, and would adjust their own picks based on that knowledge.
Both high schools I attended started between 7:15am and 7:30am. One was located in Northern Illinois, and the other was located in Western Michigan. I graduated in 1999, and I don't think either has changed much. Middle school had classes starting at 7:05am and elementary school was at 7:45.
IPv6 still has very experimental support for things like PIM (or the equivalent), which is very important if you want to limit which groups get multicast. There are two current methods to have multicast traffic be controlled -- and both are not compatible with each other -- and both cause multicast traffic to hit the CPU of switches and routers in every brand I've found. This is really problematic when you are trying to transfer large amounts of multicast traffic (like video, for example), because every packet will have to be inspected by the CPU or flooded out to each port. In my case I'm constantly streaming ~ 8GB/s of multicast video....
Multicast works great on Internet2 between ISPs and schools. It also works very well within the LAN environment as well.
It's very well defined. I use it every day. Comcast uses it to transport all of their CATV channels between their headends.