One thing I neglected to mention is that Comcast cable is included in my rent.
Yes, well, that pretty much ends the discussion before it starts... If you're stuck with it, you're stuck with it. It doesn't negate my point at all, though, as the vast majority of people AREN'T forced to pay for cable/sat.
I will say, however, that you will still get better picture quality, and less outages, on the broadcast channels if you opt to add a (free) converter box and an inexpensive TV antenna to your setup.
All I ever watch are Discovery/History/Food TV/Adult Swim (Cartoon Network), and none of those are available over-the-air. What do you suggest people like me do?
Your viewing habits aren't far different my own, yet I've dumped cable.
First off I'd strongly suggest you get an HDTV converter box, and look a little closer at PBS programming in your area. Shows like American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, History Detectives, etc., easily surpass anything the History Channel has. Science shows like NOVA, Wired Science, Nature, etc., are far better than anything Discovery has produced in the past decade. For cooking, you're even better off... One of the digital sub-channels on my nearest PBS station is NOTHING BUT cooking shows 24/7. If your schedule doesn't fit into the air time of these shows, a DVR is a pretty inexpensive investment.
As for Adult Swim, I admit I don't know of a close match on broadcast TV. But you can continue watching Adult Swim over the internet via their official website.
Besides that, there's the option of Netflix. With their lowest priced $9/month subscription, you have unlimited use of their Watch Now service, which currently includes dozens of programs from the History Channel, a few from Discovery, not to mention several other TV networks. Pretty much everything else on the two Networks is available for rent from Netflix on DVD (all without commercials, popups, etc.), as well as plenty of Cartoon Network programs, and pretty much an unlimited selection of Cartoons/Anime that DOESN'T get aired even on Adult Swim, or anywhere else. At worst, they are cheaper than any cable TV provider...
And honestly, you probably don't need to do that. How many hours of TV do you watch per week? Try out a few of the shows (especially the ones I've listed) on OTA broadcast TV, and you'll find your daily allotment of TV viewing filled up very quickly.
basically that cable coming into your house has a bandwidth of roughly 1GHz
The physical cable itself certainly does, but RF theory doesn't always translate into real-world benefits...
Theoretically, Cable and Satellite Cos could just remodulate that 8VSB signal (eg. to QAM256) to fit in less bandwidth, with zero quality loss... The reality, however, is that they DON'T. They recompress/requantize that MPEG-2 video rather aggressively, to squeeze it down even more. Decision time: Do you go for 999MHz of crappy-looking video for at least $50/month, or do you go for 300MHz of OTA bandwidth, filled with maximum-quality video, for for $0?
And while you're thinking about that, note the other pros/cons. eg. With OTA, you can start receiving programming the instant you plug-in your TV... No waiting a week for a cable installer. OTA broadcasters practically never have outages, whereas city cable goes out fairly regularly. OTA is far, far less susceptible to snow build-up, rain fade, imperfect aiming, etc., than satellite.
Now, you're thinking: "But... BUT... MORE CHANNELS!"
So broadcast works for an environment with few channels (more now we're going digital) but still relatively few compared with cable
Well, that's true, but you have to consider the CONTENT of those channels. Let's see what's on RIGHT NOW. USA is showing episode after episode of NCIS repeats. A&E is doing the same with COLD CASE. Spike is doing the same with CSI. Repeat ad nauseum. Those that aren't showing repeats of broadcast TV shows are mostly instead replaying rather old and mediocre movies... Children of the Corn, Independence Day, Van Wilder, The Family Man, Casino, Rocky IV, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, The Shining, et al.
Also keep in mind that those movies are interrupted with very long commercial breaks, censored, edited, poorly overdubbed, sped-up, and covered-over with on-screen pop-up ads plus distracting sound effects, often pan & scanned, etc.
So, are you getting your money's worth out of cable?
If you want to watch CSI, why not watch it the 4 times a day it's broadcast OTA on CBS, or when it's syndicated on other broadcast channels late at night? Why not get a cheap DVR and save it, so you can record it every time it's broadcast, watch them whenever you prefer? If you're so very interested in one of the very, very few original shows on cable, why not wait a couple years until they're syndicated on OTA broadcast channels, or (at worst) rent/buy the DVDs a month after the season ends?
If you want to watch a crappy old movie you've seen a dozen times before, why not walk over to the TV and drop in on of the 100 DVDs you own outright, and save 1/3rd of your time, and ALL of your nerves? Why not subscribe to Netflix for 1/3rd the price, and have an endless supply of movies and TV shows that you get to choose from, and watch whenever you want, without the ads, pan&scan, bad editing, etc.?
Yes, you get "more" channels... But they're just filled with REDUNDANT content. Broadcast channels are repetitive enough on their own, producing 15 episodes of a weekly show every year, to fill 52 weeks of airtime. Do you really need MORE repeats of that same show, on two cable channels at a time, over and over for years to come? Is that a service you want, and think it is worth $50/month?
And guess what? Unions are shrinking, left and right. I guess the Corporations are doing a better job of buying Union-busting laws than the Unions are of buying their own set of laws.
You're either a paid (or at least heavily interest) shill, or borderline delusional, to see the world as so heavily in favor of Unions, when the reality is in fact rather the opposite.
Without a set top Box rental, you will be better off watching OTA ATSC, and not subscribing to cable at all.
I would go quite a bit further than that... Even now, you're simply far better off with OTA ATSC than Cable/Satellite. End of story.
With the advent of high quality OTA broadcast TV, inexpensive DVRs, and DVDs, what purpose does cable TV serve?
I haven't yet seen one cable/sat provider who isn't re-compressing the broadcast signal to hell and back, so OTA is now the choice with the highest picture quality.
Even if you don't care about how blurry and artifact-ridden your channels are, just about all service providers manage to screw things up one way or another... All cable provider that I've had the displeasure of dealing with (Charter, Time Warner, Cox), have lines so noisy that you get REGULAR picture breakups...
And digital cable/sat services want to provide both a full-screen version, and a widescreen version, but many try to save bandwidth by mangling the two together to some in-between aspect ratio that the simply crop and stretch to fit either screen size, but neither ever looks right.
Meanwhile, the entire broadcast infrastructure in the US has been getting converted to high-quality digital for the past several years, so that very nearly every household in the country can pickup ATSC broadcasts with a modest antenna. And we're just a couple months away from the final step that will improve reception even more as many broadcasters switch their digital signal over to their main transmitter. They're literally giving away digital converter boxes. And frankly, the simplest, cheapest antennas work the best...
I'm in an area listed as only able to receive a couple crappy local stations with ANY antenna... Yet, with a simple loop antenna stuck in a window, which I just happen to have hooked up through a dirt cheap amplifier (both of which I've literally had for decades; occasionally used when the cable/sat signal dies, and/or for terrible staticy OTA reception for spare TVs not hooked up to cable/sat here and there over the years) and the cheapest ATSC card I could find, I'm getting great reception on the main channels I want... And more importantly, all those channels I can't quite get a digital lock on right now, just happen to be ones who currently broadcast analog on VHF-high (7-13), and from whom I am able to receive a staticy analog picture with the same said loop antenna in the same window. The point being... even here way into the fringes, I'm pretty well assured of getting the full set of broadcast channels here in the deep fringes, with little more than a $2 antenna, at higher quality than with a $50/month subscription, and with fewer signal dropouts. And I'm willing to bet that 90% of Americans aren't even in as bad (RF poor) of a area as I am... the mountain ranges every 15 miles out here in the west make reception a lot more challenging.
But I digress... With OTA broadcast now being the best option for the above reasons, you really need to work hard to justify spend $50/month for cable/satellite service. The overwhelming majority of basic-cable channels are nearly endless repeats of shows that were broadcast, and frankly, broadcast channels are catching on to that trend, each buying-up 3+ cable networks to get their slice of the pie.
Not to mention that there are plenty of OTA broadcast channels that offer all the same syndicated shows, and have been syndicating both basic and premium cable TV shows for decades now... And if watching your HBO shows with commercials, and censored, on broadcast TV doesn't appeal to you, DVDs are inexpensive enough to fill the need. A subscription to Netflix can make renting your favorite shows on DVD considerably cheaper than subscribing to cable... Not to mention the large number of TV shows they make available for free to subscribers with real-time streaming to any Windows PC, or a $100 set-top-box.
The future of Television looks bright... It just looks like cable and satellite TV will be reduced to a tiny niche, rather than the modern necessity it was for the past decade+.
American auto makers have no problems competing outside the USA.
Yes, yes they do. They are losing substantial market share internationally, just not quite as quickly as they have in the US.
Why? Well, they are not subject to asinine CAFE standards, congressional regulations and miles and miles of red tape that have been added on to BIG EVIL AUTO MANUFACTURERS by the US Congress.
Ford Motor Co. is subject to the same regulations as GM and Chrysler, yet they aren't going in front of congress saying they may go bankrupt within a week...
Toyota and Honda are subject to the same regulations as GM, Ford, and Chrysler, yet they have seen huge market-share gains over the past few years, where GM has seen record market-share losses.
Yes, nearly a MILLION people are getting lifetime health insurance benefits because of the Auto unions squeezing the tit of BIG AUTO,
Yes, poor, poor GM. They have no power up against the big bad Union. Clearly, they were forced to sign the employment contracts. It's completely unfair to expect them to pay retirement benefits for their former employees.
It's always nice how ultra-right-wing types like to rant and rave about Unions, even as their ranks dwindle and their power disappears, and ignore the billions and billions of dollars going to compensation for highly paid executives... particularly galling that they very, very often get paid MORE when their company does worse, and have to go to the government with hat in hand asking for free money to keep their Ponzi scheme afloat.
the auto unions threatened massive amounts of immediate pain (strikes) for a labor contract that would meet with disaster in 10-20 years.
Yeah, because employees can induce unlimited pain on companies, while companies can't possibly apply ANY pressure at all on employees. Oh the poor oppressed multi-national corporations.
Every single other industry in America, when faced with similar treatment (Big EVVVVil oil, or evil [insert industry here]) they simply pulled up stumps and moved their industry overseas.
Except that they didn't... Big Oil has just as big of a footprint in the US as they ever have. A great many companies in the US have grown. Manufacturing in the US has never stopped growing, so there's more now than there has ever been.
And let's not get distracted by hyperbole. Let's stick with THIS INDUSTRY. While GM has been hemorraging money for years, Japanese car companies have been building more plants in the US. Clearly, the US auto industry and manufacturing is only a problem if you're a US company... And not Ford. If you're a foreign company (or Ford), it seems to work out just fine.
Nobody makes big, rugged hard working vehicles like the Americans can.
Funny, because plenty of Japanese car companies sell extremely successful lines of large trucks. Toyota certainly does quite well with their trucks.
People WANT to buy American vehicles, if they weren't so expensive due to regulations, taxes added to production costs, and union overhead added on to the sticker price of each vehicle
When gasoline was $4/gallon, NOBODY wanted to buy a truck. Plenty of people who DID buy American vehicles, put them in their front yards with For Sale signs in the window, and at ridiculously low prices, no less... And this was even before the recession began.
Besides, it's only in your imaginary world that people who desperately want to buy a $40,000 (US-made) truck are getting scared off by the extra $2,000 in the price tag due to legacy worker and environmental costs, and turn tail to go buy a tiny Japanese-made car... It's a laughable assertion.
You are actually half-right that the US makes the best trucks in the world, that people want to buy... Unfortunately, those aren't from GM, Ford, and Chrysler... They're from companies like Mack, CAT, Peterbuilt, etc. Entirely different.
No private company did this, until the Ansari X Prize subsidized them.
That's more or less a happy coincidence. Rutan didn't set out to create spacecraft for the sake of winning the X Prize, nor could it, since it didn't exist when he started. Not to mention that the 1 Million price wouldn't be very much motivation... It was only shortly before Rutan's team was practically ready to launch that Ansari stepped in a ballooned the cash prize into something respectable. At most, the X Prize nominally sped-up the first test flights, and increased the amount of press coverage.
Everything since then has been purely, undeniably, capitalistic. Richard Branson isn't paying to develop a fleet for the sake of some subsidy, somewhere.
I am yet to come across a single work environment that uses OO rather than MS Office
In the past 6 years, TWO of the large (1000+ employees) companies I have worked for have done just that. And I have heard endless stories of others doing the same. I suspect your experience is either quite narrow/limited, or else highly unusual.
But if you'd like an even better example, how about Firefox?
You haven't had any motherboards with exploded capacitors.
Dozens, in fact.
Everything still "functions" but nothing functions correctly.
At worst, that state of affairs keeps up for a week, before the capacitors either completely give out and the board stops working, or the chips get fried from the wonky unfiltered power.
It is these spaceships that will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in the history of the universe.
That's a little presumptuous, don't you think? In the multi-billion year history of the Universe, and all the innumerable planets that have ever existed in it, you're really SURE that there hasn't ever been any affordable space tourism?
No technologically inclined species on a small planet with rather low gravity? No planets with super-volcanic mountains that peak just slightly shy of orbit? No species of living beings robust enough that they can handle the massive G-forces of being fired out of a cannon on the ground? etc.
Boy is your face going to be red when the Quixblarxians land their space ship in the parking lot of the nearest courthouse just to sue you for defamation of their space tourism industry...
You would be amazed how many hours you waste in a year of using a flaky computer.
Not since the early days of Socket 7 have I seen ONE flaky motherboard. That's after personally managing thousands of systems in the past several years.
99.99% of all the bugs and instability that get laid at the feet of computer hardware are purely the fault of software, and by that, I mean Windows. Much like the pseudo-religious superstitions of the primitive people of the dark ages, Windows users keep themselves sane by trying to apply rituals to appease the computer gods, and avoid the random nonsensical behavior of their system.
If you want to claim that some manufacturers make crappy drivers for their products, I won't argue, but I can pretty conclusively state that most all computer hardware made in the past decade is incredibly reliable... And, when there is a hardware fault, it is quick, deterministic, and exceedingly obvious... ie. nothing that causes just a couple programs to crash, appears briefly after your computer has been running for days, or otherwise leaves you with an even minimally usable system.
The vast majority of computer users that do not read/. on a regular basis equate "doing Y" with "program X."
Yes, they DO equate them, but that is simply out of ignorance of alternatives, not some serious personal preference.
If you suddenly drop them in front of a completely unfamiliar interface and say, "But you can still do Y, you just have to adapt to a new interface & way of doing some/many/all things you used to do," you will meet with resistance, irritation, and frustration.
And yet, Open Office has been incredibly successful at replacing Microsoft Office... ie. You have no idea what you're talking about.
"As long as you don't care about using all the software these guys use,
99% of computer users in the world don't care whether they can use program X. They just care that they can use SOME program to do Y. So your comment is really splitting hairs in an attempt to make Linux sound worse for no reason. You could equally well have gone the other way and said that you get rid of your "old software" because the "new software" is better, and free.
I admit that unlike with these guys I don't easily work with the hardware you already have...
A stitch in time... As I've said before, with Windows (or MacOS for that matter) sure, you get something that always sort-of minimally makes your hardware work, while you don't always get new hardware working that easily under Linux. Still, after you put that little bit of work into getting your hardware working, it won't spontaneously corrupt the drivers, lose the settings, etc. And you can do far, far more with whatever it is under Linux than you could possibly have under Windows (short of writing your own full-fledged programs from scratch).
Consumer grade switches of 1997 blow away hubs, too. I'm still using mine... never had ONE problem with it. Still working like new, except of course for some yellowing of the plastic case due to a previous location near a window.
The OP may be thinking of combo NAT-routers/switches like Linksys and D-Link... cheap junk that just BARELY works when its like new, and on a good day.
Today's steam engines, and internal combustion engines, on the other hand, can really make building those kind of structures possible on a large scale.
It was terribly impractical then, and it's terribly impractical now.
Hundreds of millions of dollars is spent just to repair ancient historical sites before they collapse. Decidedly not practical to do for a non-trivial number of buildings around the world.
If you're ever in the market for old houses, pay close attention to any stone-work, particularly around the fireplace. If you find any stonework that isn't just a facade of cut stone picese over concrete, grab it ASAP, before they realize what they're selling... Stone work is so labor and materials intensive that the kinds of fireplaces found in every upper-class home from a century ago is unaffordable for multi-millionaires today... Economics changes. I can certainly envision our grandchildren looking back and thinking how terribly expensive and impractical it would be to drive a 20th century automobile that gets a mere 20 MPG, and needs routine maintenance...
If you travel through southern Europe, you'll see several engineering works, like the Pont du Gard, Coliseum, Arles amphitheatre, etc, which had no equal a thousand years after they were built.
If some project decides to use an obscure library, why don't they just include it with the package in the first place? Most of the time only the one (or two) project uses it.
I'll agree with you when it comes to any GUI program made/funded by the FSF or GNU projects. They have a morbid fascination with making every trivial part of a program, with next to no chance of ever being used separately from the application, into it's own separate project.
There are less and less of us left that want to kick the hell out of anyone that thinks the command line should go away or be used as little as possible. Slackware is what it is - a robust linux system that tries to be as unix-like as possible.
I don't mind the motivation, but I am infuriated by the mindset of most Linux distros that decide to include some really crappy GUI for system configuration, that can just BARELY do the basics... A GUI which then mucks up the system so badly that it's a nightmare to go back and try to configure the system the "normal" way, because of config files being overwritten by some automatically generated files, by some deeply embedded startup command, which gets it's parameters from some DB file hidden in some stupidly titled random location on the system.
THAT is the real nightmare. If some Linux distro actually wrote full-fledged configuration utilities which could tweak every possible parameter, and which had both GUI and scriptable equivalents, I would be reasonably happy. But as it is, the half-assed attempt just makes things worse. Even if you don't like the command-line, you can't deny that system configuration is (currently) much easier without the available GUI tools that only half do the job, and really screw up the system in a fundamental way.
While partially true to some degree, you won't learn too much about Unix even from Slackware. The open source operating system that I would say is by and far the most similar to Solaris/SCO/AIX, etc., would have to be OpenBSD.
While Linux systems like to pile on feature after feature, and multiple different ways to do... EVERYTHING... OpenBSD instead continues to simplify the base system rather than adding extra new layers.
eg. The start-up script is one single file:/etc/rc. Instead of a plethora of different shells, none of which are complete, they instead improved pdksh until it had all the capabilities of BASH, at perhaps 1/4th the size. See: mksh. They continually remove GNU utilities (eg. grep), and replace them with versions that have more traditional Unix style. Instead of adopting OSS like FreeBSD and Linux, OpenBSD still uses 'sun' style audio output/drivers. And while even FreeBSD has adopted kernel modules, OpenBSD keeps everything in the (quite small) kernel, and has full plug-and-play capability, without any clunky run-time program needed to detect system changes and load different kernel modules. In fact, getting programs to compile on traditional Unix systems, I often find myself referring to the patches in OpenBSD Ports, as the issues are often identical.
Of course this story is days old, and my post is just a reply, so next to nobody will ever see it, but there you have it.
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Penises are very important to men, who must urinate to survive.
Men should be encouraged to urinate in public as frequently as possible.
It is a decadent and depraved culture that finds images of penises urinating "obscene".
The real problem is that our culture apparently has many infantile adults who find the true function of a male penis to be upsetting.
The targets of your protests (ie. Facebook) also reserve the right to tell you to fuck off, and opt to ignore your request.
WHAT? No cellphones in the US in 96? Were you living in some low-rent town in the middle of nowhere at the time?
I'd say around 1/3rd of everybody I knew, owned a cell phone by '96.
No. Drawing intense attention on one specific issue at a time is the ONLY way to start improving this.
Thinking about the immensity of the problem just leads to people, like you, throwing up their hands and doing nothing.
Yes, well, that pretty much ends the discussion before it starts... If you're stuck with it, you're stuck with it. It doesn't negate my point at all, though, as the vast majority of people AREN'T forced to pay for cable/sat.
I will say, however, that you will still get better picture quality, and less outages, on the broadcast channels if you opt to add a (free) converter box and an inexpensive TV antenna to your setup.
Your viewing habits aren't far different my own, yet I've dumped cable.
First off I'd strongly suggest you get an HDTV converter box, and look a little closer at PBS programming in your area. Shows like American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, History Detectives, etc., easily surpass anything the History Channel has. Science shows like NOVA, Wired Science, Nature, etc., are far better than anything Discovery has produced in the past decade. For cooking, you're even better off... One of the digital sub-channels on my nearest PBS station is NOTHING BUT cooking shows 24/7. If your schedule doesn't fit into the air time of these shows, a DVR is a pretty inexpensive investment.
As for Adult Swim, I admit I don't know of a close match on broadcast TV. But you can continue watching Adult Swim over the internet via their official website.
Besides that, there's the option of Netflix. With their lowest priced $9/month subscription, you have unlimited use of their Watch Now service, which currently includes dozens of programs from the History Channel, a few from Discovery, not to mention several other TV networks. Pretty much everything else on the two Networks is available for rent from Netflix on DVD (all without commercials, popups, etc.), as well as plenty of Cartoon Network programs, and pretty much an unlimited selection of Cartoons/Anime that DOESN'T get aired even on Adult Swim, or anywhere else. At worst, they are cheaper than any cable TV provider...
And honestly, you probably don't need to do that. How many hours of TV do you watch per week? Try out a few of the shows (especially the ones I've listed) on OTA broadcast TV, and you'll find your daily allotment of TV viewing filled up very quickly.
The physical cable itself certainly does, but RF theory doesn't always translate into real-world benefits...
Theoretically, Cable and Satellite Cos could just remodulate that 8VSB signal (eg. to QAM256) to fit in less bandwidth, with zero quality loss... The reality, however, is that they DON'T. They recompress/requantize that MPEG-2 video rather aggressively, to squeeze it down even more. Decision time: Do you go for 999MHz of crappy-looking video for at least $50/month, or do you go for 300MHz of OTA bandwidth, filled with maximum-quality video, for for $0?
And while you're thinking about that, note the other pros/cons. eg. With OTA, you can start receiving programming the instant you plug-in your TV... No waiting a week for a cable installer. OTA broadcasters practically never have outages, whereas city cable goes out fairly regularly. OTA is far, far less susceptible to snow build-up, rain fade, imperfect aiming, etc., than satellite.
Now, you're thinking: "But... BUT... MORE CHANNELS!"
Well, that's true, but you have to consider the CONTENT of those channels. Let's see what's on RIGHT NOW. USA is showing episode after episode of NCIS repeats. A&E is doing the same with COLD CASE. Spike is doing the same with CSI. Repeat ad nauseum. Those that aren't showing repeats of broadcast TV shows are mostly instead replaying rather old and mediocre movies... Children of the Corn, Independence Day, Van Wilder, The Family Man, Casino, Rocky IV, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, The Shining, et al.
Also keep in mind that those movies are interrupted with very long commercial breaks, censored, edited, poorly overdubbed, sped-up, and covered-over with on-screen pop-up ads plus distracting sound effects, often pan & scanned, etc.
So, are you getting your money's worth out of cable?
If you want to watch CSI, why not watch it the 4 times a day it's broadcast OTA on CBS, or when it's syndicated on other broadcast channels late at night? Why not get a cheap DVR and save it, so you can record it every time it's broadcast, watch them whenever you prefer? If you're so very interested in one of the very, very few original shows on cable, why not wait a couple years until they're syndicated on OTA broadcast channels, or (at worst) rent/buy the DVDs a month after the season ends?
If you want to watch a crappy old movie you've seen a dozen times before, why not walk over to the TV and drop in on of the 100 DVDs you own outright, and save 1/3rd of your time, and ALL of your nerves? Why not subscribe to Netflix for 1/3rd the price, and have an endless supply of movies and TV shows that you get to choose from, and watch whenever you want, without the ads, pan&scan, bad editing, etc.?
Yes, you get "more" channels... But they're just filled with REDUNDANT content. Broadcast channels are repetitive enough on their own, producing 15 episodes of a weekly show every year, to fill 52 weeks of airtime. Do you really need MORE repeats of that same show, on two cable channels at a time, over and over for years to come? Is that a service you want, and think it is worth $50/month?
Corporations pay for the laws as well.
And guess what? Unions are shrinking, left and right. I guess the Corporations are doing a better job of buying Union-busting laws than the Unions are of buying their own set of laws.
You're either a paid (or at least heavily interest) shill, or borderline delusional, to see the world as so heavily in favor of Unions, when the reality is in fact rather the opposite.
I would go quite a bit further than that... Even now, you're simply far better off with OTA ATSC than Cable/Satellite. End of story.
With the advent of high quality OTA broadcast TV, inexpensive DVRs, and DVDs, what purpose does cable TV serve?
I haven't yet seen one cable/sat provider who isn't re-compressing the broadcast signal to hell and back, so OTA is now the choice with the highest picture quality.
Even if you don't care about how blurry and artifact-ridden your channels are, just about all service providers manage to screw things up one way or another... All cable provider that I've had the displeasure of dealing with (Charter, Time Warner, Cox), have lines so noisy that you get REGULAR picture breakups...
And digital cable/sat services want to provide both a full-screen version, and a widescreen version, but many try to save bandwidth by mangling the two together to some in-between aspect ratio that the simply crop and stretch to fit either screen size, but neither ever looks right.
Meanwhile, the entire broadcast infrastructure in the US has been getting converted to high-quality digital for the past several years, so that very nearly every household in the country can pickup ATSC broadcasts with a modest antenna. And we're just a couple months away from the final step that will improve reception even more as many broadcasters switch their digital signal over to their main transmitter. They're literally giving away digital converter boxes. And frankly, the simplest, cheapest antennas work the best...
I'm in an area listed as only able to receive a couple crappy local stations with ANY antenna... Yet, with a simple loop antenna stuck in a window, which I just happen to have hooked up through a dirt cheap amplifier (both of which I've literally had for decades; occasionally used when the cable/sat signal dies, and/or for terrible staticy OTA reception for spare TVs not hooked up to cable/sat here and there over the years) and the cheapest ATSC card I could find, I'm getting great reception on the main channels I want... And more importantly, all those channels I can't quite get a digital lock on right now, just happen to be ones who currently broadcast analog on VHF-high (7-13), and from whom I am able to receive a staticy analog picture with the same said loop antenna in the same window. The point being... even here way into the fringes, I'm pretty well assured of getting the full set of broadcast channels here in the deep fringes, with little more than a $2 antenna, at higher quality than with a $50/month subscription, and with fewer signal dropouts. And I'm willing to bet that 90% of Americans aren't even in as bad (RF poor) of a area as I am... the mountain ranges every 15 miles out here in the west make reception a lot more challenging.
But I digress... With OTA broadcast now being the best option for the above reasons, you really need to work hard to justify spend $50/month for cable/satellite service. The overwhelming majority of basic-cable channels are nearly endless repeats of shows that were broadcast, and frankly, broadcast channels are catching on to that trend, each buying-up 3+ cable networks to get their slice of the pie.
Not to mention that there are plenty of OTA broadcast channels that offer all the same syndicated shows, and have been syndicating both basic and premium cable TV shows for decades now... And if watching your HBO shows with commercials, and censored, on broadcast TV doesn't appeal to you, DVDs are inexpensive enough to fill the need. A subscription to Netflix can make renting your favorite shows on DVD considerably cheaper than subscribing to cable... Not to mention the large number of TV shows they make available for free to subscribers with real-time streaming to any Windows PC, or a $100 set-top-box.
The future of Television looks bright... It just looks like cable and satellite TV will be reduced to a tiny niche, rather than the modern necessity it was for the past decade+.
Yes, yes they do. They are losing substantial market share internationally, just not quite as quickly as they have in the US.
Ford Motor Co. is subject to the same regulations as GM and Chrysler, yet they aren't going in front of congress saying they may go bankrupt within a week...
Toyota and Honda are subject to the same regulations as GM, Ford, and Chrysler, yet they have seen huge market-share gains over the past few years, where GM has seen record market-share losses.
Yes, poor, poor GM. They have no power up against the big bad Union. Clearly, they were forced to sign the employment contracts. It's completely unfair to expect them to pay retirement benefits for their former employees.
It's always nice how ultra-right-wing types like to rant and rave about Unions, even as their ranks dwindle and their power disappears, and ignore the billions and billions of dollars going to compensation for highly paid executives... particularly galling that they very, very often get paid MORE when their company does worse, and have to go to the government with hat in hand asking for free money to keep their Ponzi scheme afloat.
Yeah, because employees can induce unlimited pain on companies, while companies can't possibly apply ANY pressure at all on employees. Oh the poor oppressed multi-national corporations.
Except that they didn't... Big Oil has just as big of a footprint in the US as they ever have. A great many companies in the US have grown. Manufacturing in the US has never stopped growing, so there's more now than there has ever been.
And let's not get distracted by hyperbole. Let's stick with THIS INDUSTRY. While GM has been hemorraging money for years, Japanese car companies have been building more plants in the US. Clearly, the US auto industry and manufacturing is only a problem if you're a US company... And not Ford. If you're a foreign company (or Ford), it seems to work out just fine.
Funny, because plenty of Japanese car companies sell extremely successful lines of large trucks. Toyota certainly does quite well with their trucks.
When gasoline was $4/gallon, NOBODY wanted to buy a truck. Plenty of people who DID buy American vehicles, put them in their front yards with For Sale signs in the window, and at ridiculously low prices, no less... And this was even before the recession began.
Besides, it's only in your imaginary world that people who desperately want to buy a $40,000 (US-made) truck are getting scared off by the extra $2,000 in the price tag due to legacy worker and environmental costs, and turn tail to go buy a tiny Japanese-made car... It's a laughable assertion.
You are actually half-right that the US makes the best trucks in the world, that people want to buy... Unfortunately, those aren't from GM, Ford, and Chrysler... They're from companies like Mack, CAT, Peterbuilt, etc. Entirely different.
That's more or less a happy coincidence. Rutan didn't set out to create spacecraft for the sake of winning the X Prize, nor could it, since it didn't exist when he started. Not to mention that the 1 Million price wouldn't be very much motivation... It was only shortly before Rutan's team was practically ready to launch that Ansari stepped in a ballooned the cash prize into something respectable. At most, the X Prize nominally sped-up the first test flights, and increased the amount of press coverage.
Everything since then has been purely, undeniably, capitalistic. Richard Branson isn't paying to develop a fleet for the sake of some subsidy, somewhere.
In the past 6 years, TWO of the large (1000+ employees) companies I have worked for have done just that. And I have heard endless stories of others doing the same. I suspect your experience is either quite narrow/limited, or else highly unusual.
But if you'd like an even better example, how about Firefox?
Dozens, in fact.
At worst, that state of affairs keeps up for a week, before the capacitors either completely give out and the board stops working, or the chips get fried from the wonky unfiltered power.
Thank you, Yoda.
That's a little presumptuous, don't you think? In the multi-billion year history of the Universe, and all the innumerable planets that have ever existed in it, you're really SURE that there hasn't ever been any affordable space tourism?
No technologically inclined species on a small planet with rather low gravity? No planets with super-volcanic mountains that peak just slightly shy of orbit? No species of living beings robust enough that they can handle the massive G-forces of being fired out of a cannon on the ground? etc.
Boy is your face going to be red when the Quixblarxians land their space ship in the parking lot of the nearest courthouse just to sue you for defamation of their space tourism industry...
Not since the early days of Socket 7 have I seen ONE flaky motherboard. That's after personally managing thousands of systems in the past several years.
99.99% of all the bugs and instability that get laid at the feet of computer hardware are purely the fault of software, and by that, I mean Windows. Much like the pseudo-religious superstitions of the primitive people of the dark ages, Windows users keep themselves sane by trying to apply rituals to appease the computer gods, and avoid the random nonsensical behavior of their system.
If you want to claim that some manufacturers make crappy drivers for their products, I won't argue, but I can pretty conclusively state that most all computer hardware made in the past decade is incredibly reliable... And, when there is a hardware fault, it is quick, deterministic, and exceedingly obvious... ie. nothing that causes just a couple programs to crash, appears briefly after your computer has been running for days, or otherwise leaves you with an even minimally usable system.
Yes, they DO equate them, but that is simply out of ignorance of alternatives, not some serious personal preference.
And yet, Open Office has been incredibly successful at replacing Microsoft Office... ie. You have no idea what you're talking about.
99% of computer users in the world don't care whether they can use program X. They just care that they can use SOME program to do Y. So your comment is really splitting hairs in an attempt to make Linux sound worse for no reason. You could equally well have gone the other way and said that you get rid of your "old software" because the "new software" is better, and free.
A stitch in time... As I've said before, with Windows (or MacOS for that matter) sure, you get something that always sort-of minimally makes your hardware work, while you don't always get new hardware working that easily under Linux. Still, after you put that little bit of work into getting your hardware working, it won't spontaneously corrupt the drivers, lose the settings, etc. And you can do far, far more with whatever it is under Linux than you could possibly have under Windows (short of writing your own full-fledged programs from scratch).
Consumer grade switches of 1997 blow away hubs, too. I'm still using mine... never had ONE problem with it. Still working like new, except of course for some yellowing of the plastic case due to a previous location near a window.
The OP may be thinking of combo NAT-routers/switches like Linksys and D-Link... cheap junk that just BARELY works when its like new, and on a good day.
It's been a long time since the last Hot Grits post. I bet the /. kiddies with the 7-digit UIDs don't get it at all.
It was terribly impractical then, and it's terribly impractical now.
Hundreds of millions of dollars is spent just to repair ancient historical sites before they collapse. Decidedly not practical to do for a non-trivial number of buildings around the world.
If you're ever in the market for old houses, pay close attention to any stone-work, particularly around the fireplace. If you find any stonework that isn't just a facade of cut stone picese over concrete, grab it ASAP, before they realize what they're selling... Stone work is so labor and materials intensive that the kinds of fireplaces found in every upper-class home from a century ago is unaffordable for multi-millionaires today... Economics changes. I can certainly envision our grandchildren looking back and thinking how terribly expensive and impractical it would be to drive a 20th century automobile that gets a mere 20 MPG, and needs routine maintenance...
A WHOLE thousand years, eh?
I think you need to take a detour to Egypt...
I'll agree with you when it comes to any GUI program made/funded by the FSF or GNU projects. They have a morbid fascination with making every trivial part of a program, with next to no chance of ever being used separately from the application, into it's own separate project.
See GPG, GNASH, et al.
I don't mind the motivation, but I am infuriated by the mindset of most Linux distros that decide to include some really crappy GUI for system configuration, that can just BARELY do the basics... A GUI which then mucks up the system so badly that it's a nightmare to go back and try to configure the system the "normal" way, because of config files being overwritten by some automatically generated files, by some deeply embedded startup command, which gets it's parameters from some DB file hidden in some stupidly titled random location on the system.
THAT is the real nightmare. If some Linux distro actually wrote full-fledged configuration utilities which could tweak every possible parameter, and which had both GUI and scriptable equivalents, I would be reasonably happy. But as it is, the half-assed attempt just makes things worse. Even if you don't like the command-line, you can't deny that system configuration is (currently) much easier without the available GUI tools that only half do the job, and really screw up the system in a fundamental way.
While partially true to some degree, you won't learn too much about Unix even from Slackware. The open source operating system that I would say is by and far the most similar to Solaris/SCO/AIX, etc., would have to be OpenBSD.
While Linux systems like to pile on feature after feature, and multiple different ways to do... EVERYTHING... OpenBSD instead continues to simplify the base system rather than adding extra new layers.
eg. The start-up script is one single file: /etc/rc. Instead of a plethora of different shells, none of which are complete, they instead improved pdksh until it had all the capabilities of BASH, at perhaps 1/4th the size. See: mksh. They continually remove GNU utilities (eg. grep), and replace them with versions that have more traditional Unix style. Instead of adopting OSS like FreeBSD and Linux, OpenBSD still uses 'sun' style audio output/drivers. And while even FreeBSD has adopted kernel modules, OpenBSD keeps everything in the (quite small) kernel, and has full plug-and-play capability, without any clunky run-time program needed to detect system changes and load different kernel modules. In fact, getting programs to compile on traditional Unix systems, I often find myself referring to the patches in OpenBSD Ports, as the issues are often identical.
Of course this story is days old, and my post is just a reply, so next to nobody will ever see it, but there you have it.